Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  That sort of obliquity, beloved of English departments, is unacceptable in Hollywood, where the rewrite is constant, collaboration is the rule for writers, tradition is the method, whoring is the necessity, and easy money is the objective. Not a natural fit for the likes of Faulkner, and yet—medicating himself with booze—he thrived there, was well paid, and was much in demand. Many brilliant writers in the thirties, forties, and fifties found work in Hollywood—Aldous Huxley, James Agee, John Steinbeck, John Collier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West—yet even the most earnest moviegoer would find it hard to name a film written by any of those writers. But Faulkner was serious and successful, and his scripts—for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Land of the Pharaohs, and The Left Hand of God—are well known. His commitment to the work is clear when you discover that he wrote the last two movies in that list after he won the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature.

  Scriptwriting is drudgery, a massive insult to the brain of a person who cares about the nuances of language; it is no more literary than elaborating a recipe for clam chowder. I have written nine screenplays (God forgive me these chronicles of wasted time), and anyone who has written one knows the tedium of such a task, the inexact science of the script, the approximation of description and Byzantine camera angles, the baroque technicalities of shooting, the frustration of dealing with a team of bullying know-it-alls and domineering money men and often the trickiest actors in the bleak land of the Philistines.

  And that is not the worst of the awful craft, which is the epitome of the rejection business. The hack aspect of it is that it is a long experience of compromise, the antithesis of great (and especially Faulknerian) fiction writing. It is a study in strict time limits and the attention span of the dimmest moviegoer, negotiation, teamwork, script conferences, let’s-try-it-another-way, multiple versions, rewrites, second-guessing, and deliberate vulgarity, all in the aid of pleasing the moviegoing public and of getting bums on seats. Never again for me. How did Faulkner stand it?

  Faulkner and his many biographers claimed that he wrote scripts to make money, but can he have been so hard-up? His Nobel Prize was $30,000, a large sum at the time, yet he continued to write scripts after he was flush with that windfall. As his fiction demonstrates, he was adept at writing dialogue, so that part of his Hollywood experience would have been easy money. But Faulkner is on the record as saying that he did not enjoy going to movies, especially his own.

  There is a further and more devastating awfulness. As all scriptwriters know, many scripts are exercises in pure futility. The first draft is written, a rewrite is ordered, other writers are summoned to doctor the thing, script conferences are called for, and after all this work, time, compromise, argument, and editing, the project is put in turnaround, or shelved, or killed outright. An utter waste of time and brain power.

  Faulkner must have known a good deal of this humiliation. And that is perhaps why, though we have The Last Tycoon, The Day of the Locust, and other vivid novels of Hollywood, Faulkner—who worked as a screenwriter for more than twenty years, who knew directors intimately and many actors (Bogart and Bacall, for example)—never wrote a word of fiction about the place and never mentioned it except in grumpy letters. And he worked longer in Hollywood and knew it better than his screenwriting contemporaries Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, who wrote those novels.

  Given the stark difference between the order, blandness, and strict chronology of a movie script, and the apparent disorder, florid description, and disjunction in time of Faulkner’s books, it is worth considering that his experimental fiction was a reaction to the discipline of his scriptwriting—that it was an acting out of an impulse of “manic defense.”

  This combative-sounding psychological term, coined by Freud’s pupil Melanie Klein, elaborates on Freudian theory to explain a form of evasion. “By adopting a triumphantly scornful attitude toward psychic reality, the patient uses this kind of defense to avoid the depression associated with the conviction of having destroyed an internal object.” A scriptwriter, subjected to all sorts of idiot opinions, brusque readings, and demands for rewrites, might, in private time, on a personal project, write a sixty-page sentence with arbitrary punctuation as a form of assertion—or so it seemed to me, on the basis of my course in Psychology 101. “Manic defenses are typified by three feelings, namely control, triumph, contempt.”

  Hollywood for Faulkner was also an escape from the tension in Rowan Oak, his fractious marriage, and the provincialism in Mississippi, and it gave him opportunities—as it has so many others—to indulge his libido. Faulkner may have been reserved in public, but he was privately passionate. Of the howlers associated with the authorized, two-volume, 2,100-page biography by Joseph Blotner, one is the omission of Faulkner’s extramarital love affairs (several of them crucial to his literary work), and another is the circumspect treatment of his adulteries. Yet that biography is fastidious in the inclusion of such irrelevant details as dinner menus and the names of Little League baseball players Faulkner had casually met.

  His paradoxes aside, Faulkner remains original and indispensable. No other region in America had a writer who was blessed with such a vision. Sinclair Lewis defined the upper Midwest and showed us who we were in Main Street and Elmer Gantry, but he moved on to other places and other subjects. Faulkner stayed put, he achieved greatness, but as a writer, as a man, as a husband, as a delineator of the South’s arcane formalities and its lawlessness, his was a life of suffering.

  “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi,” he said. And one of his wisest characters, Ike McCaslin (in “The Bear” in Go Down, Moses), seems to speak for him when he cries out to the black stranger, “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted.”

  PART THREE

  * * *

  Spring: Redbud in Bloom

  Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out of town.

  —CHARLES PORTIS, The Dog of the South

  Mud Season

  In the misleading twinkle of early spring, an afterglow of sun-struck afternoon drizzle (“I shine in tears like the sun in April”), the mud around my house was just another illusion of the season, a sodden surface of squashy soil and puddled lawn; and in the woods, with its tweedy gradations of brown and the same tweedy itch, the only hints of green were the bristling elbows of cedar boughs and the wicked needles of pitch pines; and on the woodland floor, a clutter of rain-blackened leaves. Beneath it all, and a few inches under the slab of blobbed and gummy mud, was a substratum of frost left over from winter.

  This leakproof layer of ice kept the water—the new melt, the recent showers—from draining away. It was the month of dirty hands and spattered pant cuffs and wet shoes, of deep footprints in the dark green grass that brimmed with muddy water, of that teasing sparkle on some days and raw wind on cold ones, with mornings of heavy dew, sometimes a stammer of warmth and the slow drip that suggested a faint pulse, the swelling of life and the setting in of the annual thaw.

  Mud season. The world was softened by the dribble of dampness, the soaked granite boulders of the garden wall shining, the lawn like a hog wallow, and troughs of wheel tracks along the unpaved driveway. Walking across the bare ground was like tramping through a shelf of chocolate cake, sinking into the fudge and gunk thickened by standing water. Some of the trunks of doomed saplings were whitish and peeled, some teeth marks visible, the edible bark having been gnawed by hungry voles, starved in the winter snow. Tiny, almost imperceptible buds had begun to sharpen on twiggy branch ends.

  Spring was also a prism of damp smells radiating in a rainbow of ar
omas, and there was hope in those exhalations of spring—a change from the unreality of odorless, nose-pinching winter cold. Rising from the mud was the tobacco blast of old leaf mulch, the sour honk of saturated earth, the prickle of evergreens, the sweet breath of damp grass, and in places wisps of dusty vapor rising from wrinkled seams in the warmed dirt. The tang of these sensations directed my attention downward to the nub of sprouting bulbs, smooth and hopeful, some tulips like inch-high knuckles, the bird beaks of crocuses, the fiddleheads of ferns, the thin green slips of irises, others with sharpened tips, onion domes of new lilies putting out tapers, all of it climbing from the slick and crumbly mud.

  Leaving footprints in the soggy lawn, I tramped to my car, slung my gear in the back, and drove 580 miles to Fredericksburg, Virginia. There I slept soundly. I woke and drove 450 miles more, where I left the superslab of the interstate. I rode slowly down a side road through the sunshine and the dogwoods and azaleas, and the redbud just starting to bloom, to the town of Aiken, South Carolina.

  Steeplechase in Aiken

  “Here for the steeplechase, sir?” the woman at the Hotel Aiken asked me at the front desk. Her name was Amanda. The hotel was old-fashioned and roomy, unfussy and comfortable, with the smug solid ordinariness of an English coaching inn, on the main street, which itself resembled a high road in an English market town, shop fronts squared against the wide sidewalks, and the whole tidy community in great shape—thriving, or so it seemed.

  “Oh, right, the steeplechase,” I said, a beat too late, because that was not the whole truth.

  I was in Aiken for its contradictions. Many towns in the Deep South are full of oddities and ironies, but Aiken had more than most, and there was another merit to the town: it was not seedy, it was bursting with life, a very pretty and spirited place, and especially welcoming on this festive weekend.

  “I have a single room for you,” Amanda said, her finger on a page of her reservations book. She gave me a frank stare, a faint smile floating at her lips. “But I have to warn you that you won’t get any sleep. We have two bars and a live band, and it’s going to be real noisy. Everyone’s going to be partying, and most of them will be drunk, and we won’t close up until about two a.m. Unless you’re a drinker too.”

  “I’m not much of a drinker.” And I thought: God, I hate the word “partying.”

  “This here’s the biggest weekend of the year, people coming from miles around for the steeplechase. The horse people, the race people, the rich people, the college kids—oh, yeah, the gamblers, the hat people. And they all like a real good time.”

  “The ‘hat people’?”

  “There’s a kind of informal competition. ‘Best hat.’” She was nodding with certainty and slipped into a heavy drawl, with the self-conscious jocularity Southerners sometimes use with outsiders in an effort to be persuasive. “Ah mo tell you somethin’. It gon’ to be real loud here, so if y’all want a good night’s sleep, y’all go somewhere else.”

  I thanked her, left the Hotel Aiken, drove to the edge of town to the Days Inn. There I was checked in by the owner, who said there was a complimentary breakfast (I knew in advance it would be Froot Loops in a Styrofoam bowl) and introduced himself as Mike.

  “Mike?” I said in a querying, clarifying tone.

  “Mike Patel.”

  Solicitous, deferential, helpful, anxious to please, in a ball cap and a bum-freezer, the inevitable Mr. Patel.

  Aiken was the complete Southern town, and though it was of modest size, it was in character larger than life and had a number of claims on my attention. Its outskirts were radioactive, as I had discovered on my last ride down Atomic Road, which passes a few miles southwest of it, on the river. Aiken’s big houses—some of them manor houses—were lovely and well maintained, and the main part of the town was laid out on symmetrical broad boulevards. Aiken was Southern in its disparities: mansions on the boulevards here at the center, shacks on the notorious streets at the periphery, and racetracks, polo fields, the occasional gun show at the fairgrounds, and this week the Imperial Cup Steeplechase.

  On my autumn trip I’d seen that Aiken was the nearest town to the nuclear plant, the Savannah River Site, and to the deceptively rustic, radiation-soaked banks of that river. (You need lots of water if you’re splitting atoms, and there are often messy spills.) Many of the scientists, technicians, and support staff lived in Aiken. I went there out of sheer curiosity, and it couldn’t have been a better decision.

  This well-proportioned and prosperous-looking town was a horsy place with a history as a winter colony for wealthy visitors from the North, including John (“Jack”) Astor IV and his nineteen-year-old wife, Madeleine Force Astor (Jack died on the Titanic, Madeleine survived), New Yorkers Charles and Hope Iselin, and later Fred Astaire, who was as keen on breeding racehorses as he was on tap-dancing, and some of whose wife’s family lived in Aiken. Many others had left their mark, prettifying the small town with their wealth.

  One of the earliest railways in America ran from Aiken to Charleston in 1833, built for hauling cotton bales from the huge plantation near Aiken that was owned by Captain William White Williams. Like many another Southern town, Aiken (the name came later) was a cotton plantation that became a community, a marvelous early example of American urban design. Around 1835, a master plan had been imposed on it, drawn up by a Harvard-trained surveyor, Alfred Dexter, who had fallen in love with a local beauty, Captain Williams’s daughter Sara. At his father-in-law’s suggestion, Dexter planned a town with streets wide enough to allow cotton wagons to make U-turns easily. As an orderly town with a good climate, Aiken attracted wealthy Northerners, some of them interested in “equestrian living” (as the town advertises its culture today)—horse breeders, riders, polo players, fox hunters.

  The “Blessing of the Hounds” took place every Thanksgiving weekend, with solemnity and drinking; the equestrian calendar of Aiken was dense with fox hunts, the winter sport. Some were live hunts, chasing foxes, but most were “drag hunts,” the scent of a fox laid with a trailing rag through Hitchcock Woods and nearby fields. The drag-hound pack and mounted hunters chased the foxy odor over obstacles as a test of horsemanship.

  The snowbirds and the horse people and the cotton barons had built grand houses, planted gardens, formed clubs, and set out golf courses. This social infrastructure would have been unsupportable without cheap labor in the form of domestic staff, servants, gardeners, field hands, cooks, nannies, and sweepers, the workforce of the underclass that traditionally propped up and helped create the economy and society of the South.

  And so Aiken also had—and still has—a substantial black community, a third of the population, at the bottom of the heap in income. In stark contrast to the conspicuous magnificence of Aiken proper, its orderly tree-lined thoroughfares, its substantial houses set in well-tended gardens of trumpet vines and irises and honeysuckle and the local yucca called Spanish bayonet, are the simple, run-down, slab-sided houses of the blacks, enslaved at one time, then segregated, and now simply poor. They endure, living humbly as Aiken’s peasantry on potholed roads at the periphery of the town and farther afield in the seedier corners of Aiken County. But everywhere, rich and poor, redbud was in bloom, a froth of purply pink flowers on bare branches.

  “I’m going to wear a big old hat I made myself,” a young waitress, Rachel, told me that night at a restaurant. “I’ve been working on it for ages. It’s all decorated with ribbons. And a real pretty and colorful dress.”

  “I got me my new corduroys, I got my beads—these here are from Kenya,” Gregory Jefferson told me in the Polo Bar of the Hotel Aiken, where I was loitering. He was stylishly dressed—a dark vest, a flowered shirt, strings of beads around his neck. He laughed when I asked him whether he would have been welcome in this bar when he was younger. “No, man, this was a Jim Crow town,” he said. “But it’s okay now. You can go anywhere.”

  He was celebrating at the hotel but was not sure whether he’d be at the steeplechase. He
didn’t pay much mind to horses, he said.

  “You’re going to see some amazing clothes tomorrow—yellow pants, green hats, pink shirts,” a frat boy named Lyle, wearing a Lambda Chi pin on his blazer, promised me.

  This was at the racecourse at sundown, the evening before the steeplechase. Lyle was there with his frat brothers Chance and Brian. The University of South Carolina at Aiken was not far away, and gave the town added prestige, as well as a casual labor force. In the gathering darkness these students were parking attendants at the annual dinner, a formal affair in a big tent near the steeplechase’s grandstand.

  “Everybody’s going to be drunk,” Chance said. “When I say everybody, I mean every damn person you see tomorrow is going to be falling down.”

  “What about the race?” I asked. “The Imperial Cup.”

  Brian said, “Hey, I was so shitfaced last year I didn’t even see a horse.”

  We stood in the thick, dew-drenched grass, watching the diners getting out of their luxury cars, the men in tuxedos, the women in ball gowns, wearing high heels, tittupping across the turf of the racecourse to the lighted tent.

  “Who are these people?” I asked.