I was charmed by the delightful sound of Miss Bowen’s very English voice, not exactly marred by stuttering, but made a little comical when she came to speak of our wonderful b-b-buh-bourbon whiskey. Or related coming into the airport of some Western city (she had been lecturing throughout the United States), and how she had admired those numerous neon s-s-suh-signs. I wondered at her courage to undertake lectures at all, but am told that her certainly imposing looks—she was tall, strongly built, with red hair swept back—more than made up for the flaw. I came to know that she was one of Eudora’s closest friends and had invited her often for visits to Bowen’s Court, the family home in County Cork, Ireland, and that each lavished admiration on the other’s work.
The two ladies were late in appearing that day, not having started early enough from Jackson. I had been seated in the restaurant foyer waiting for a good while when two young officers from the nearby air base came out of the bar and started to talk. Was I waiting for someone? Yes, two women friends from Jackson. Both from Mississippi? No, one was from Ireland. “Ah, a Jackson doll and an Irish babe!” When the imposing pair actually came through the door, regal in their tweeds, the Air Force wilted away.
At that time I had a new novel about to come out in the spring. Having finished a book creates difficulties in starting another. My work, taken up each day, seemed stubborn, inclined to limp along rather than run.
In spare afternoons, closing up the hope of a fresh start for yet another day, I used to drive to places I loved seeing. One by one they were there for me to find and re-find, always giving off to me their air of a past that I knew had occurred, but that I had no key to opening up. They could not help me to do what a writer most enjoys, visualize with confidence what has not actually been seen.
For instance, there was DeLisle, a town site inland from the beach drive, northwest of Pass Christian. Once you were out of sight of water, oaks gave room to pines, the tall longleaf pines of South Mississippi, and the road, largely unpaved, was carpeted in pine needles, quietened by a mix of sand in loam. DeLisle itself had been fairly populous once, and was all but entirely French, the descendants of the Acadians from Nova Scotia having settled here. French was used in school far into this century. A plain little church was still standing, and a few houses. The spaces where houses and stores must have stood were peaceful savannas, moss-hung round the edges, keeping memories not to be shared with me. A cloud of butterflies could be counted on to waft about like a length of yellow silk floating on air. A wooden bridge led over still, black water, Bayou DeLisle.
A few miles beyond, I would come to the really spooky place, Pine Hills, an old resort hotel, set in extensive grounds at the head of Bay St. Louis. It was begun during a boom year, 1926, and some people around Pass Christian had told me that it never opened, thus awakening in my mind images of fabulous chateaus, villas, castles, or mansions, richly prepared for expected guests, the snow-white linens starched and spread, the place settings of china, crystal, and silver all laid, the bedrooms expectant and fragrant, the staff coached, the management ready with smiles. Then—no one comes. All that is largely fantasy, of course; the hotel went down as an operating venture in the crash of 1929 and never reopened. Until a couple of years ago, it still stood, empty and expectant.
To go there alone past the entrance gates, to observe the small filling station with pumps for gas still in place and, toward the far right, outbuildings of every sort standing vacant—stables? garages? servants’ quarters?—the tennis courts all weedy silence, and, most of all, to see looming straight ahead the massive hotel itself, windows by the hundreds with no one behind them, the curving entrance drive where no arriving guests would ever alight, no door ever swing wide to receive them—this was awesome.
It was told to me that the long room to the left of the entrance lobby had been the banquet hall. I once crept close enough to see if the tables were, as I had been told, still prepared for dinner, but I don’t recall confirmation of that tale. Perhaps to anyone able actually to enter those dusky halls and cobwebbed lobbies, details would have opened out—a pen ready beside a blank registration page, a key forgotten in a cabinet for vases, one final ashtray left unemptied on a table. Who knows?
Rounding a corner of the hotel, one came suddenly into a full view of Bay St. Louis. Came only to learn that others before the hotel builders had felt the command and sweep of this site. A towering Indian shell mound, said to be the largest on the coast, still stood for marveling at. Even more than the hotel, it held its mystery: how it came to be put there, for what impressive purpose. At least the hotel planners had the sense to leave it alone. Perhaps they thought of it as a curiosity for the guests to look at as they strolled at twilight in full evening dress before cocktails and dinner. Now both monuments—hotel and mound—stand side by side, looking out over the bay. And the bay may well be asking itself who will come next to rear a monument and pass away.
My other favorite spot to visit—far over to the east in Ocean Springs—was, in contrast, very much a going concern. The Shearwater Pottery was owned and run by the Anderson family. It wasn’t that easy to find. You had to know where to look.
You reached the house from a street in Ocean Springs, having searched carefully for a modest sign, a little plank nailed to a tree, saying SHEARWATER POTTERY and sporting the painted logo of a gull at wing. The drive to reach it wound through shaggy growth—small oaks, azaleas, Cherokee rose bushes, and camellias, all looking never to have been planted or tended, part of the wild. A turn and there was the Anderson house, modest, like the sign, but beautiful in its traditional Gulf Coast architecture: the gables, the slanted roof, the porch. The pottery itself was in a shedlike building. Nearby was the shop, where the various figurines designed here were displayed, along with vases, jardinieres, plates. The designs, taken from the natural life that lay all around, had in their movement and the humor and rhythm of their execution a totally original quality. Since those days, it has come into full light how considerable an artist was at work here. Locally known and protected—he evidently was the sort of eccentric people fear may come to harm—he was certainly prized by coast people during his lifetime. But I doubt if any friend or neighbor or visitor knew the extent, let alone the magnificence, of Walter Anderson’s art. He seemed, like the Lord God before him, to be creating every day, fish, fowl, plants, flowers, trees, sea, and air, leaving behind him such abundance at his death that the Gulf Coast needs to find no other means to immortality.
I used to see them—him or one of his brothers, sometimes both, though which brother I never quite got straight. They were in and out of the shop, looking not so much distracted as alive to other matters than who came in to buy. Yet you could talk with them, ask questions, which were cordially and briefly answered. They went about in old dungarees, canvas shoes, denim shirts, a pullover in winter. This was right for them. I brought people there who came to visit me. Some of their figurines I bought—“widgets,” they called them—have gone with me on many moves. A wing may break from a gull, or a foot from a dancing black man, and have to be mended, but the charm, the humor of execution remain intact. I have a watercolor painting by Walter Anderson of a brilliant rooster, standing on big yellow feet, flaunting his tail feathers of purple and gold.
Since Walter Anderson’s death in 1965, exhibitions of his work have traveled to many cities, and books of his “logs” and art continue to appear.
So these were the poles, the Bay and old hotel, speaking of a dimly understood past, and the Shearwater Pottery, alive with the present mystery of art continuing on its course.
Many years later, Ship Island, the very spot where I had caught my breath to see the Gulf in all its expanse and glory, found itself in the target eye of a destruction so complete that the coast as we knew it could never be restored. Its name was Hurricane Camille.
Other hurricanes, memorable ones, had struck the area. One in 1947 burst the seawall to bits; it was replaced by a man-made beach of white sand. Betsy, in 1
965, swept the beach away; it was built up again. But to Camille, all such efforts might have been sand castles left by a child. The statement was repeated too often to be false that here was the most powerful hurricane ever to strike the continent; none stronger was to be found in any record or in human memory.
In 1969 I was living in Montreal, but I saw more than enough of it on TV. I saw the few cars that crept through a world that was not falling down but bursting apart horizontally, trees, buildings, and telephone poles fighting like wildcats through the haze of wind and water to remain, slowly losing a night-long battle. I saw evacuation moving massively north along the highways, heard stations fading from the air, until all communication, like threads snipped one by one, was cut. I was left, in the distant northern night, to dream of other horrors still—my favorite old mansions crashing to flinders, piers lifted from their pilings to coil like whips in the storm’s fury, giant oaks with their roots nakedly exposed. But whatever I could imagine would still be less than the actual disasters of August 17,1969.
I returned to the area in the summer of 1970 to do a reading at Gulf Park, a junior college whose solid concrete buildings had survived the holocaust. I flew to New Orleans and rode to Gulf-port on the bus. As we approached the coast through the marshy land west of New Orleans, I heard a woman talking behind me to someone she was sitting by. She had had to wait out the hurricane in Biloxi, at the hospital bedside of her father, who was too ill to be moved. “It was something more than natural,” she kept repeating. “It was like one of them bomb experiments done got loose. It was just a lot more awful than anything natural could be.” The tremor in her voice made me think that what had come that night would not leave her.
Not that I could blame her. The bus reached Bay St. Louis and crossed the bridge. To the right was open water, calm and innocent, but everything that had stood between the road and the water had vanished. The shoreline and the road were at least twenty yards higher than before. A wonderful alley of oaks, a cool tunnel of bearded moss, was simply gone, as were the noble white houses just beyond them, and all their gardens. Double staircases, high verandas like a dream of long summer afternoons, tall white-painted fences with wrought-iron gates, all were gone. Only walkways remained.
Back of the bare rerouted beach drive, I later saw whole groves of pine trees reduced to blackened stumps, as though the land had been burned over. I was told that sand driven by winds that had reached two hundred miles an hour (and probably much more: instruments at the time could go no higher) had blackened whatever it struck. How far back did the monster range, how far along the coast had it foraged? Sickened by the loss, I didn’t want to hear any more statistics. The real message was written already in the ragged shoreline, the disappearance of the Pass Christian Yacht Club with its brave flags and trim marina, the few stricken and displaced houses that had somehow got through. This place was finished. “Gone with the wind” was waiting to be wryly said here. It may be in order to observe that Camille, with her demure name like a Southern belle’s, did a better job than Sherman.
I knew I must write about all this someday. I had already done a number of stories about various points along the Gulf or in the Caribbean. The writer A. J. Leibling, who loved the area, insisted that the Caribbean was this hemisphere’s Mediterranean Sea. I agree. Its ways of life, its mystery, belong to the sea and create lifestyles and outlooks that are totally, rhythmically different from what we think of as our own “normal” ways of living.
But it was the hurricane itself, its wild force and aftermath, that stayed with me and finally grew into the novel The Salt Line, which took many years in writing. I made a number of trips to the coast, lingering for weeks at a time. I heard hundreds of stories from people I knew who lived there. I read through innumerable accounts in the all-new library in Gulfport. I even went out once more to Ship Island. The lighthouse was gone, no victim of Camille, which she had somehow gallantly weathered, but burned down, I was told, by some boys on a lark. The island itself had been split in two parts by the storm. Now land that had offered the first harbor the French explorers had found and had been the scene of historic wartime events, decades of Sunday school picnics, and countless romantic afternoons was now two diminished little islands with the sea flowing between.
Back at Pass Christian the Gothic-style white-painted Episcopal church in its grove of oaks was gone—the rector, I learned, had seen his wife and child drowned in the tidal wave while he held to the front steps and reached out vainly to bring them in.
Ocean Springs, however, I found to my delight, was hardly touched. Best of all, Shearwater Pottery had been spared. It was still to be reached by its shaggy winding road, and there I discovered what others had found after the death of Walter Anderson. A hidden treasure was in a small cottage adjacent to the main house and the pottery, where he had lived in later years quite alone, his place of refuge.
This singular man had died soon after sitting through Hurricane Betsy in 1965 on Horn Island. He had gone out on purpose to get as close as possible to the invader. It is well known that Horn Island, like the cottage, was his special province. He rowed to it often, stayed there for weeks at a time, kept a journal about his experiences, and, of course, painted and drew its creatures, plants, flowers, sand, and sea. The hurricane to him must have been one more visiting live thing. He died soon after the experience of it, though not before rejoicing in his log:
Never has there been a hurricane more respectable, provided with all the portents, predictions, omens, etc., etc. The awful sunrise—no one could fail to take a warning from it— the hovering black spirit bird (man o’war)—only one— (comme il faut) …
The cottage where he painted has now been entirely moved to the new Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs. There one finds the walls set up as they were when he covered them entirely in brilliantly colored murals, all revealing his vision of the coast, its flora and fauna, its myth and its reality. The book that reproduces this astonishing work is called A Painter’s Psalm. I know of no greater work anywhere in this country—it is safe to say that we must go to Europe for achievement to compare with it.
The character central in my novel The Salt Line, Arnold Carrington, also has a vision of the coast. Regretting Camille’s destruction, he tries to restore by building anew what was typical of the old. Many of his feelings are echoes of my own:
… the old pre-hurricane Coast: shrimp boats and ancient oaks, camellias in bloom, flags flying from the old white lighthouse, moonlight on the Sound, softly blowing curtains of Spanish moss … where to find this unity of house, shade and sun … the brick walk, the moss barely stirring to its familiar breeze of this hour, this peace and precious past…
But “gone are the days” is something all Southerners have had to get used to. Days are going all the time, taking with them places and times, leaving memories good and bad. I had taken a lot from the coast. For others to come, the sound is still there and the sea beyond the islands, opening toward unknown worlds.
23
NEW YORK AND BEYOND
IF the Gulf Coast was a presence in my life from the earliest times, New York had never been so until my first novel was accepted. That early visit had made me eager for more, but the brief passage through it after the Îie de France docked in 1949 was hardly fulfilling. Every street I walked on or hotel I stopped in or play I attended made me feel its powerhouse of energies and possibilities, all to explore someday. But when?
In fact, to me the whole life of cities was a mystery. I thought maybe they were all pretty much alike, if I thought about them at all.
In the summer of 1950, while still at work on my second novel, This Crooked Way, I had the chance to go to the writers’ conference held annually at Bread Loaf in Vermont. I received an invitation to be a fellow, and had heard favorable reports from a friend of those years, Caroline Ivey, herself a beginning novelist, whom I had known at Vanderbilt. There was also the lure of seeing Donald Davidson, who had a summer house in that ver
y place.
Bread Loaf was a meeting ground for a goodly company, and many were pleasant to know. Richard Wilbur, then a budding poet, remains an admired acquaintance to this day. Young and lanky and soft-spoken, he made a nice contrast to another poet, John Ciardi, whose style was flamboyant. Dick’s calm manner made an art of cool understatement.
I was privileged to spend some hours in the evenings with the Davidsons. We went once on a picnic together up in the Green Mountains. I almost fell in a canyon, trying to recover something dropped. One evening Davidson, who played and sang well, entertained Mrs. Davidson and me with some ballads, the sort of music he loved, played on a curious old-fashioned instrument held flat on a table, something like a cithara or zither. I still remember “The Golden Van-i-tee,” its sad tale of an English ship of that name at war with “the Spanish e-ne-mee,” dating back to Renaissance days.
Another evening he invited me to make a fourth at dinner along with Robert Frost. After a fine New England meal at the Middlebury Inn, we drove back and sat for a long evening, Mrs. Davidson and I listening while the two men conversed over the sad state of affairs in America. Frost was more relaxed in his views than was Davidson. Davidson was especially disturbed by some of the more liberal attitudes in Washington and in the literary and academic world. He was convinced that certain ideas were abroad which called for open opposition. “I want to fight,” Davidson declared. Frost smiled gently. “You want to fight, do you?” They were both hearty conservatives in their views, and deplored much that was going wrong, but I think Frost’s attitude was to take an oblique approach when it came to social comment, to use precise particulars which set some deeply known and loved local thing against the general drift. He was neither an essayist nor a polemicist.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 25