Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  When Cy was about to tell a story or make a naughty quip he would cover his mouth in a schoolchild’s way, fingertips lightly touching his primly pursed lips, while above them the eyes were alight and impish. I watched memory veil those eyes as he spoke of a time in the late 1960s when he and Nicola had been invited to the Spoleto Festival by its founder, Gian Carlo Menotti. That evening a Russian pianist was performing, and Menotti honored Cy and Nicola by seating them in his private balcony in the Opera Theatre. As they took their seats they were startled to see behind them Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, one of the three women with whom Pound had simultaneous relationships. Cy described Pound as having an aura, a mystical appearance, and as being somehow set apart from regular people. Nicola wrote me later that Pound “acted… extremely shy like only a northern blond child could be. He hardly looked at us and in a side way.”

  Telling me of this in the humid summer night, Cy emphasized how rare it was to see the reclusive poet, who seldom appeared in public in those later years. Pound had been driven mad (or perhaps more mad) by his wartime incarceration in Pisa for treason. It was there, locked up like an animal in a 6 × 6½ foot wire cage, that he began writing on a piece of toilet paper the uneven but brilliant Pisan Cantos. (Interestingly, housed in the cage next to him was Emmett Till’s father, Louis, until he was hanged “for murder and rape with trimmings,” as Pound put it.) After Pound began to show clear signs of a mental breakdown, he was shipped from Pisa back to the United States and confined to the “bughouse” at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. A decade after his release in 1958, Pound stopped speaking altogether. Much was made of his self-imposed silence, and it has always been reported that not a single word ever passed his lips once he began it.

  Except, to their amazement, Cy and Nicola heard Pound speak to Olga. They both described it as the whispering of a deeply wounded and suspicious man, but also of a man fading out of this life. Cy said he would have loved to exchange just one word with this intransigent, mysterious, wrong-headed, brilliant man. Instead he and Nicola somehow maintained a posture of intense interest in the music played before them, arching backwards in their seats, hoping to hear the thoughts of a genius.

  Imagine that—on my peckerwood porch, late in the humid, cloyingly fragrant Virginia night, Cy, in a Pound-like whisper, tells a story I found marvelous in the many improbable threads it wove together: that he had seen, had heard Ezra Pound, the author of the lines written on my father’s memorial stone, with whom I held a long fascination, and that within this tale was another of my long-held fascinations, Emmett Till. And of course that the storyteller was Cy, the local hero, come back to sit in the dungheap-turned-garden that was our home, the prodigal returning to Lexington.

  Cy often walked the streets of Lexington, and I would occasionally go with him. Strolling along on the uneven brick sidewalks, he had a remarkably deferential physical presence for such a big man. He would step aside and nod decorously to the old “widder” women, who had long outlived their husbands. Lexington’s streets have changed little since the war, and of course I mean The War, the only one that counts here. In certain charming ways (and others less so), much of the town dozed off in 1865 and it hasn’t ever quite awakened.

  A friend of my mother’s tells a story about a house just over the hill from our farm, commandeered in 1864 by the Union army to be General Hunter’s headquarters during his raid on Lexington. When I was young it belonged to a man with the unlikely name of Torkle McCorkle. My mother’s friend visited Torkle’s house and after examining some of the books in the library, he wrote:

  I did not find a single title published later than 1862… a mixture of melancholy and guilt assailed me. The library, the house, the grounds, were as General Hunter found them when he rode down the Valley toward Lynchburg. Time could be stopped, I thought, and by other hands than those of God.

  He’s right: time, if not stopped, is certainly slowed in Lexington, and that may have been what most charmed Cy; it certainly charms me. Even the pace of art-making, like most everything else, is leisurely, especially in summer. Evening, once the temperature drops, is the best time to work; often, late at night, driving through the shuttered town, I’d see light seeping from the venetian blinds of Cy’s studio.

  One of the theories about why so few successful practitioners of the plastic arts come from the South holds that the heat stultifies us. There is some truth to this, though it may also be time-related; I believe we in the South have a different sense of time and its exigencies. In fact, in Cy’s case, I think growing up in the American South made his transition to Italy easier. Cy himself once remarked, “Virginia is a good start for Italy.… Virginia made me very southern in a way. They say that they are not creative in the South, but it’s a… rare mentality.”

  The British historian John Keegan appears to have agreed with Cy’s assertion. After traveling through America, Keegan reported:

  The thing about the South is that it retains for Europeans a trace of cultural familiarity, as the rest of the country does not.… I have often tried to analyze why I should have a sense, however slight, of being at home in Dixie. Class system, yes; history, yes; but more important, I suspect, is the lingering aftermath of defeat. Europe is a continent of defeated nations.… America has never known the tread of occupation, the return of beaten men. The South is the exception. Its warrior spirit, which supplies the armed forces with a disproportionate flow of recruits, is a denial of the decision of 1865. The famous femininity of its women—not a myth, not to European men at least, who find them feminine as other American women are not—is a quality that comes from grandmothers who found a strength their men had lost, learnt to comfort, helped to forget, and never, never said the unsayable thing. Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not.

  Shelby Foote, astute observer of his own southern culture, expanded upon this sentiment:

  I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat.… We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry… too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

  Mr. Foote was perhaps being a little extreme, exaggeration being another southern characteristic. It’s not that we southerners are exactly in love with death, but there is no question that, given our history, we’re on a first-name basis with it. And such familiarity often lends southern art a tinge of sorrow, of finitude and mourning. Think of the blues, for example, or early jazz; think of Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor, and others; think of the titanic triad of Rauschenberg, Johns, and Twombly in the visual arts. Cy was talking to me about them once, the three painters, and he said that if a book were ever written about them, it should be called Dickheads from Dixie.

  That was classic Cy: oddly self-effacing, with a kind of negligent grace about him. He made his rare gift, that genius, all the more seductive by the casual way he possessed it: with a whiff of mischief, an ambivalent intensity, and a charming insouciance. People mistakenly thought him shy, which he wasn’t really, and innocent, which he wasn’t, either. Okay, in some ways he was innocent, but for sure he wasn’t naïve, and neither was his art. A friend once quipped that naïveté in art is like the digit zero in math; its value depends on what it’s attached to. In Cy’s case, it was attached to a honking big number.

  He could be wickedly funny. I once watched as a quartet of worshipful, white-gloved young art handlers from New York untacked his paintings from the studio walls and laid them on pristine white cloths on the floor. Worth a king’s ransom and headed to some major museum, they were rolled up and reverently placed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled truck. As soon as the doors were shut and triple-locked, Cy, exaggerating a hand-dusting maneuver, his eyes dancing with devilry, announced: “Well, I’m glad to get that shit out of here.” He laughed to see the white gloves rush to the shocked faces.

  Puttin
g aside that self-deprecating assessment, nobody disputes that Cy produced some of the greatest art of this and the last century—and he made much of it right here in Virginia, not in spite of the place but because of it.

  Choosing to work outside the art world’s urban centers, as both he and I have done, is difficult, at least it certainly has been for me. More than any artist I know, Cy managed this classical remove, embracing James Joyce’s artistic intent, summed up in three words at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “silence, exile, cunning.”

  Cy did not use those exact words but, in speaking to Serota, remarked:

  You know, I don’t follow too much what people say. I live in Gaeta or in Lexington and I just have all the time to myself. I don’t have to worry; I had years and years during which no one could care less, so I was very well protected.

  This strategy worked well for Cy, and I believe it allowed him an uncommon freedom of lyric expression, especially evident in his photographs, with their soft, dreamlike quality. They edge close to the deadly minefields of sentiment, that most disputed artistic territory, but Cy always managed to stroll elegantly and imperviously through that dangerous landscape, putting elegiac feeling into these pictures—and screw anyone who didn’t like it.

  His photographs are hazy and casually indifferent to detail—this is not an eidetic memory; this is the way our minds recall and our hearts remember. They have a misty kind of luminosity, perhaps the mists of time or the forgiving scrim of recall.

  He made these pictures not with a sharp Proustian vision but with an eye veiled by the famously thick, characteristically humid southern air. Cy tapped into some flow of ancient memory: with his distracted mien, fragmented speech, and works of rapturous mythic energy, he seemed to have been born out of time. Perhaps he was. Our part of the South, remote, beautiful, and patinaed with the past, allows us such a remove, the distance of another time.

  I miss him now each spring and fall, the seasons when he would alight in our valley, and I miss him for lots of reasons, but especially because of his irreverence, his confidence in his (and my) art, and how comfortable he was working outside the urban art world. I miss our afternoons at the kitchen table over his favorite meal: tart apples, fried on the woodstove in the cast-iron skillet with bacon fat, salt, cinnamon, and brown sugar. We would chat about stuff, not always art, but at the mention of some piece of criticism or a highbrow article, Cy and I, both of us with sensitive bullshit meters when it comes to artspeak, would roll our eyes.

  When Cy spoke about art, he often used the language of the passions, language I understand, once referring to our daughter Jessie’s style of painting as “fierce.” He understood the quirky ways we outliers have of measuring the strength of our work, remarking that his strongest paintings were usually those not sold by the end of the opening. My affinity for Cy and his approach to art, and my deep affection for him, gave me confidence that I could stay in this place I love, and make my work here.

  It’s not easy working in the South. Playing on a southern pronunciation of “Beaux-Arts,” H. L. Mencken once dismissed the South as “the Sahara of the Bozart,” and he had a point. Urban museums have little interest in artists who live down here or those who don’t live in a city. We lack a collector base, and enjoy little support or artistic fellowship. As my friend Billy Dunlap remarked the other day, the rest of the world seems to love us only when we act like characters out of a Tennessee Williams play.

  Cy would have loved that quip, and I miss not being able to tell him, to hear his snort of merriment. I miss his almost childlike glee at the most elementary human gaffes. Every time we would leave his house and catch a glimpse of the neighboring Reid White house behind the trees, one or the other of us would repeat our favorite line from a story my mother used to tell about the occupant of that house, Mrs. Breasted White. That’s what I swear I remember her saying: “Mrs. Breasted White.” But now, writing that name, it somehow seems highly improbable.

  Anyway, we’d say the punch line, sometimes in unison, and then we would both howl with laughter, as if we had just heard it for the first time. Here’s how the story goes:

  Mrs. White was, of course, a member of the Lexington Garden Club (and the way “garden” is pronounced by these ladies is “ghee-yad-en”), and her specialty was roses. Every year its local members would compete to assemble the most exuberant floral display, to be judged by someone from a classier garden club, like, say, the one in Lynchburg. This competition would be followed by refreshments: small triangles of buttered white bread with edges trimmed and tomato aspic quivering on iceberg lettuce leaves, all washed down by the daily staple of those elegant Lexington ladies who insisted they didn’t drink: restorative sherry (18 percent alcohol).

  One year, Mrs. Breasted White’s entry was a gorgeous arrangement of yellow roses whose particular qualities she endorsed in spidery cursive on a card placed nearby. Oh, how I miss our laughter, as Cy and I would recite the inscription in unison: Good in bed, better against a wall!

  6

  Our Farm—And the Photographs I Took There

  I recently flew down the Shenandoah Valley on my way home from New York. As we began our descent into Roanoke I easily picked out my own sweetly unassertive Maury River, which heads southeast about two-thirds of the way down the valley. For its entire forty-three miles it flows through Rockbridge County, during which it goes fairly efficiently about the riverine business of dumping itself into the mighty James. But about midway through its course, the Maury seems to pursue one extravagantly wasteful detour: the big, languid loop with which it almost encircles our farm.

  Even from 15,000 feet this anomaly is easily seen, resembling the shape of a boot, with the hint of an unsubstantial heel at its nether end as the river straightens out again, heading single-mindedly toward the James at Glasgow.

  This beautiful river, and the cool of its overhanging sycamores, brought my father to the offices of a local veterinarian one Friday afternoon in 1960. Daddy was looking for a couple of acres on which to build a cabin for a family retreat, and the vet had a farm on the Maury. They had come to an understanding by phone about a stretch of bottomland and agreed to settle the deal after their respective office hours that afternoon.

  Later that same evening, as my mother dressed for cocktails, turning in her full skirt before the mirror attached to the back of their bedroom door, Daddy announced that he had just purchased not the expected two acres on the river but three hundred and sixty-five. He spoke nonchalantly as he leaned over to buff his shoes, sitting on the miniature chintz-covered chair reserved for this purpose. In midturn, her skirts hissing to a standstill, my mother froze before the mirror, her startlingly teal-colored eyes staring at the reflection of the man unconcernedly putting the last swipes down on his brown Stride Rites.

  I wonder if most marriages of that time, fulcrum-based as they always have been, were as lopsided as this one, or whether my parents’ was so lopsided because of the weight of my father’s personality on the marital seesaw. He certainly didn’t cause the asymmetry by displays of physical strength, anger, or unkindness. To the contrary, he moved quietly, his sinewy physical power concealed by the blocky way he dressed. Maintaining an air of distraction as though in profound thought, he seldom spoke, and, when he did, it was with a mannerly, almost tender gentleness. How is it, then, that we were all so intimidated and awed by him?

  My mother, helplessly astride her insubstantial end of the seesaw, lacked the personal confidence and gravitas necessary for spousal balance with such a partner. Announcements to her of unilateral faits accomplis from the weighted side of the board, such as the purchase of the farm, were among the ways that my father further lightened her end, whether he meant to or not. What did he know about taking care of a large property with barns, tenant houses, pastures, forest trails, a rusting sawmill and fencing to maintain—and with what resources? He was, as we say about the novice farmer, all hat and no cattle, all hawk and no spit. But, as so ofte
n happened, this whimsical purchase was his decision alone. My father had never laid eyes on the farm he had just bought, writing without hesitation a personal check that Friday afternoon for the $75 an acre that the vet had spontaneously thrown out as a price, saying, “Oh hell, Bob, never mind the two acres. Why don’t you just take the whole thing?”

  And so, the next day, Saturday morning, my parents drove out Route 39 to look at their sudden new farm. With trepidation, they turned off the pavement onto dusty Copper Road, at the end of which was a drooping gate. Unlocking it, they passed into land so rich in beauty and perfect in proportion that by the time they unwrapped the wax paper from their sandwiches, sitting opposite the cliffs on the sunny beach where later they built their cabin, they were speechless with relief and happiness.

  Stunned as well (it turns out) was the vet’s wife when she found out that her husband, without consultation, had sold the very farm their sons were depending on for their future livelihood. I wonder if that shocking news was delivered to his wife with the same nonchalance that Daddy delivered his, but the vet heeded his wife’s distress and wasted no time in calling my father to back out of the deal.

  Having seen what he had purchased, my father was not about to give it back. But, as a way to minimize the farming family’s disruption, he allowed their son to farm it for another forty years. Our family’s contact with the farm was generally limited to holidays, and the memories we made there were correspondingly intense. We cut our Christmas trees from the edges of the forest and spent summer weekends at the cabin, a simple structure my father and brothers began building in 1961.

  But, without anyone from our family living there, the farm went downhill. The pastures were a tangle of devil’s shoelace and stickweed, with a few gallant saplings trying to make a go of it in the played-out soil. All the barns were rickety, with unpainted and leaky roofs, the tenant houses unlivable, the fences trampled by hungry cattle, and the roads impassable with ruts. In spite of the superficially terrible shape it was in, the land still had what my mother called “good bones”—beautifully undulating pastures, partly the result of our sinkhole-prone karst geology, extensive, cliff-protected river frontage, mountain views, old-growth forests, and a sense of deep privacy and sanctuary. My father deeded the farm to my two brothers and me in the 1980s, but, of the three of us, I was the one with the closest proximity, the greatest ability to maintain it, and arguably the strongest feelings about it.