by Sally Mann
So it would seem that my grandpa Collett Henry was a go-getter, having decamped from Birmingham at a young age to set up a real estate business in Dallas, where the Munger name already had conjuring power. His uncle, Steven I. Munger, had stayed in Dallas to run that part of the gin business when the company headquarters moved to Birmingham and had become a prominent figure in Dallas society. When Collett joined him there, he found a spectacularly boisterous city on the make, full of gifted hicks like himself, newly minted as oil barons or captains of industry.
Naturally he was regarded as a most desirable catch among the Dallas debs, and so it must have thrilled the innkeeping Dumas family of Paris, Tennessee, and all of little Paris, when he married eighteen-year-old Irma Dumas in 1902. His wealth was ostentatiously noted in the Paris Post-Intelligencer account of the wedding, right after a description of the bride as exemplifying “the type of young womanhood that will grace and bless the home to which she goes.”
Indeed, Irma (known as “Pan,” short for pandemonium) soon graced and blessed the household with two healthy boys. The first was Collett Henry Jr., an affable good ol’ boy who once, when I was on the way to Mexico during the July 1969 heat wave, invited me to his house in Dallas and cranked up the air-conditioning until the roaring fire he’d built in the fireplace became a necessity. The second was Robert Sylvester Munger, my father.
Daddy was cared for in his first two years by “Mammie” (yes, I swear)
and, when Mammie died, which by the looks of it was probably not so long after this picture was taken, by Hattie, until, at age fourteen, he left for the Choate School.
When he used to speak of Hattie, it was with clear emotion, a rare thing for my father. I am reasonably sure that he, many years ago, must have experienced the same harrowing heart-wrench that I recently did when I discovered that Hattie had left a hundred one-dollar bills folded into her will for the fair-haired child, my wealthy father, whom she had raised and clearly loved. Under the circumstances of the time, that number of dollars probably took her almost as many years to earn.
Hattie was not the only one who loved my father; his mother flat-out adored him.
It must have been reciprocal—take a look at that last picture; they almost could be lovers the way they are standing. Now, look at the picture full-frame:
On the right is easygoing, not too bright, destined to corpulence and heart attack, big Cadillac-driving, steak-eating, hard-drinking, country-club golfer Collett, my father’s brother, with a girlfriend, careless and smiling. As if occupying a separate universe, in a time warp of Left Bank angst and ennui, separated by a few feet in actual space but a mile symbolically, stand my father and Pan.
You can see the same easy affection again here, Daddy with his arm around beaming Pan, affable Collett to his right, a cousin in front, on their way to Europe in 1928.
What kid would welcome his mother coming along to college with him? Worse even than that, installed there as his fraternity housemother? And, okay, even if you can feature that, where would you be standing when the photographer set up his tripod for the annual Sigma Chi fraternity picture, placing your housemother Mom front and center?
The very back row, right?
His hair slicked down and his feet properly mated up, there he sits, next to an elegant Pan, that same Left Bank beret rakishly tilted, her white leather-gloved hand, for once not holding a cigarette in its customary three-inch-long holder, relaxed against the fur coat.
By this time, 1931, Irma was a widow, her husband, Collett Henry, having dropped dead in Dallas of a heart attack one winter night in 1928 after returning from the theater. He was forty-eight. My sixteen-year-old father was far from home when he died, in his second year at Choate.
Daddy had lots of time to reflect on the capricious and devastatingly final nature of death on the long, bleak train ride home to Dallas that February. But there’s plenty of evidence, photographic as well as anecdotal, that until the moment of his father’s death, my father’s life had been a carefree joyride full of the typical tomfoolery we now identify as quintessentially American.
As you might expect, guns figured prominently.
Never a hunter, and in his later years averse to killing of any kind (even household ants, to the despair of Gee-Gee and my mother), his imagination was nevertheless seized by guns early on, as this, one of his “High Art” photos, probably taken in his early teens, attests.
He often fished with his father in bass-and-bream-abundant Texas waterways
and, if the evidence of these teen pictures is to be believed, he somehow managed a loutish and peculiar marriage of guns and fishing…
I suspect a pistol figured into the demise of this five-foot rattler…
and I bet there were plenty of guns, along with the obvious alcohol, on his numerous underage trips across the border into Mexico.
Take a look at this picture for a second:
His bottle-chugging companion is wearing a tie, but, strangely, my sartorially fastidious father is not, a sign that he must really be snockered. (He had been nattily dressed by Pan since infancy, with no apparent resistance.) The cars in the background probably don’t belong to Mexicans. If we could enlarge that license plate it would almost certainly read “Texas.”
Sufficient evidence exists here of rich-boy hedonism to suggest that the elder Robert Munger’s legacy of hard work and public-mindedness was in precarious shape. A lot of money had been passed on to a son (Collett Henry), who may have known the meaning of those four letters, W-O-R-K, but who exhibited none of the rectitude, brilliance, self-restraint, or abstemiousness of the father—and who died before fifty, effectively of excess. Now the namesake grandson, inheriting the automotive imperative,
and mixing it dangerously with alcohol, guns, and an indulgent, unaware, pampered, lavish lifestyle, seemed to be headed down the same path as his father.
But… he didn’t go down that path.
Instead he became an erudite polymath, a lean, physically fit, quiet, compassionate, unpretentious, disciplined, courtly, multifaceted, some would say Renaissance man who put in thirty-eight years as a hardworking country doctor, who could instantly recognize a sub-par Cézanne or a perfectly executed Donatello, who knew enough to buy those Twomblys and Kandinskys, who was a culinary sophisticate, a lip-smacking connoisseur of coffee, a fervent horticulturist who single-handedly planted more than fifteen thousand exotic trees and shrubs that turned Boxerwood into the nationally known garden it remains, a speed demon who rode powerful motorcycles, flew his own plane and raced cars, and, though he would be astonished to read this, a father who terrified the living bejesus out of his children by his intelligence, his remoteness, and his magnetic righteousness.
So, what changed him? Why did he reverse course on the easy, well-worn path of wealthy Texas mediocrity? What sent him running—fleeing—from that Dallas lifestyle and turned him into a veritable reincarnation, in so many respects, of his august forebear, Robert S. Munger?
You already know the answer.
It’s here, in this eerily prophetic and haunting picture on one of his earliest rolls of film:
At the death of his father, the black wing of death—the wing of the final crow—brushed my father’s life. While it forever darkened the path of unfortunate Collett Henry, it paradoxically proved to be a source of light for his son.
19
Mr. Death and His Blue-Eyed Boy
Goddamn dogs. Heartbreak, every time.
A few years ago we took in a handsome pit bull whose former owner underestimated the difficulty of caring for a large and energetic dog. We folded him into our established pack of four females, the largest of them, Patui, immediately dominating the much larger Max with nimble footwork and a convincing display of ferocity. Max, a sweet-tempered dog, never challenged her and generally aligned himself with the two smaller dogs,
except when Patui needed him to step in as the closer in a varmint kill.
Most of the time Patui, a powerf
ully built, black SPCA mutt, can dispatch prey of just about any size, but in Max’s second summer with us she had met her match with an exceptionally large raccoon. She called for help from Max while she circled the cornered coon, barking and feinting. He ran straight in, grabbed the endearingly cartoonish coon head, and gave a shake so powerful that spit and feces flew from opposing ends.
Then, with a kind of dusting-off-his-paws dignity, Max turned away and walked up to his perch on the high ground above the stable, leaving the raccoon for Patui. She picked it up and began her ritualistic triumphant parade around the yard, the body of the coon dragged in the dust like Hector’s outside the gates of Troy. Max watched with satisfaction… and something else: a little touch of bloodlust.
After that first Max-kill, there were more and for each we manufactured a benign explanation: perhaps the fawn whose leg he proudly carried home had been killed by coyotes, and Max just happened by. And the entire deer, broken neck pressed hard against the fence, haunches gnawed and guarded over by Max—perhaps she had misjudged the jump. But when Max came home grinning from ear to bloody ear, a trail of pink saliva dripping from his massive jaws, I suspected the worst. It was much worse than the worst: retracing his path, I came upon our neighbor despairingly palpating the torn body of his daughter’s pet donkey who stood weakly in her pen.
When she collapsed panting and quivering, he showed me the severity of her wounds, her enormous belly torn nearly open, her haunches shredded.
Wordlessly, our neighbor walked over to his truck and got his pistol and Bowie knife. A compassionate and capable man, he knows exactly where to shoot an animal for instant death, and it surprised us that minutes after his head-shot the donkey was still alive, with bubbling foam pulsing in and out of her mouth. Time was short to save the life of the baby, so he sliced a clean cut on the underside of her bloody stomach, peeled back the skin, and made another cut to enter her uterus. Within the pale caul lay a too-tiny hairless donkey, her hooves sharp, eyes squeezed shut as if against the rain starting to fall.
Fetching Larry and his tractor, we found a place not likely to be disturbed by bear and coyotes and dug a large hole, then hoisted the donkey into the lowered bucket of the tractor, the umbilical cord trailing limply as Larry drove her to it. I rode with our neighbor back to the house where I got out, crying and queasy, and he picked up Max, who was delighted at the prospect of an adventure. Driving him to the muddy pit, he cajoled the suspicious Max into it. This time the kill shot worked.
Once again my heart was broken over a dog, each heartbreak different from the next: lymphoma, heart disease, tumors, injury, kidney failure, old age, cancer, Lyme, seizures… and now this.
I had seen that heartbreak in my father, too, with dog after dog. Those moments were about the only times I remember ever seeing him cry, but my older brother Chris said he once saw him cry on a different occasion.
He said it was when Daddy was reading out loud to our mother, a charming holdover from their early marriage when they read Faulkner’s “The Bear” to each other on hot New Orleans nights. What Chris heard him reading was a passage in C. P. Snow’s book The Two Cultures, in which Snow discusses how modern culture enforces a split between the practices of science and art and the difficulty of reconciling those two impulses if they reside within one conflicted person. I believe my father was such a person, and as he read he wept for the loss of his own rich world of ideas and art to that of medicine.
This defining existential struggle within my father is illuminated in the symbolic bookplate he designed while in medical school at Tulane. Having seen the bookplate all my life, I instantly recognized the scene when I came upon this snapshot of his desk from that time, obviously the basis for the self-expressive ex libris.
Much about his identity is revealed in the combination of preserved and invented detail that my father instructed CMB (Clara Mae Buchanan, one of his early loves) to engrave for his bookplate. Central to it are bookends carved in the figures of scholarly monks whose ancient system for transmitting knowledge is juxtaposed with the symbol of modern scientific inquiry, the microscope prominently in the foreground. Dueling pistols recall, with irony, the diversions of my father’s Texan youth. The skull and lit candle are conventional memento mori symbols, signaling his absorbing interest in the cultural representation of death.
The caduceus above the central image (which I cannot identify: a religious icon, a portrait of a Renaissance prince, a pagan philosopher, or what?) is the traditional badge of my father’s profession, but its symbolism was more personally meaningful to him than to many physicians. It is the staff of the god Hermes, several of whose properties dovetail with my father’s preoccupations.
A trickster god, Hermes would have smiled on my father’s artistic whimsies and delighted in the fantasy characters he invented to populate my childhood: Ign-Ign, Great Granny Grunt, Baby Dodo, Rabid Ant, Goggle-Eyed Slewfoot. A god with a sense of humor would have shrieked with delight, as we kids did, when Daddy dramatized our favorites, Chief Geezer and Inspector Upchuck, by hollering into the spittle-splashed horn in the center of the steering wheel as if it were a two-way radio. And because he was also the god of roads and protector of travelers, Hermes would, presumably, be the patron of modern-day car crazies such as my father. Further strengthening their accord, this god was an arborist and a scientist, but, at the same time, a devoted friend of art and literature.
This twofold association with art and science is reflected in the two snakes twined around Hermes’ staff: they are Wisdom and Knowledge, prevented from devouring each other, kept in balance, by the power of the god.
It is significant that the only authors whose names appear in the bookplate are three who gloried in the duality that the caduceus demands: Goethe, a theoretical as well as hands-on naturalist and one of the progenitors of literary Romanticism; Milton, whose poetry swept up and bathed in the light of heaven the latest discoveries of the scientific revolution; and Sir William Osler, the great Johns Hopkins doctor whose works my father collected and who assimilated, as perhaps no other comparably distinguished physician ever has, the trickster aspect of Hermes. (Osler invented a pseudonym and corresponding alter ego to publish his prank “research papers” on subjects such as penis captivus, in respected medical journals.)
But the worlds of William Osler (1849–1919) and of my father did not easily accommodate the union of art and science. In my father’s case, I believe that the painful necessity of sacrificing his literary and artistic impulses to his scientific vocation produced the emotionally inaccessible man that I knew. In a pensive 1938 journal entry written just before embarking on his Wanderjahr abroad, he came up with a striking metaphor for this denial of such a large part of himself. In it, he portrays himself as rowing toward medicine while the current pulls him artward:
Do you know how a boatman faces one direction, while rowing in another? I feel as he must: striving to obtain one goal (medicine), & looking longingly in another direction (travel & literature & art). Let’s hope the current is not too strong & the stream straight.
Apparently the stream was straight, for after the last cultural fling of his Wanderjahr, he rowed forward into thirty-eight years of dedicated medical practice. But not, I posit, without the dark pain of longing and regret.
Setting aside this particularly existential (and speculative) source of anguish, just about the only time I saw a display of emotion in my father (I do not count his getting drunk at the news of his brother Collett’s death as an emotion) was when his dog Tara, the one that pushed my mother out of the marital bed, lay dying of an inoperable cancer.
Tara loved the backseat of the family’s blue Ford Falcon, in which she would travel with my father on non-Aston Martin-accessible house calls, her enormous head hanging out of the window, slobber trailing behind them in long, windborne skeins. As she sickened, she staggered with clear intention toward the car. Daddy gathered her, no doubt nearly his own weight, into his arms, much as years later Larry wou
ld lift Daddy’s cancer-weakened body into his embrace.
With enormous tenderness Daddy carried her to the car, where he had prepared the seat with mounded-up blankets and pillows to cushion her bony body. Nobody was surprised the next morning to see my pajama-clad, muzzy-eyed father emerge from the back door of the Falcon, after somehow spending that night, and all those after, curled around her body on the narrow seat, comforting her as she lay dying.
His great affection for dogs seems to have originated in his Texas childhood, where he had any number of them—mutts and hunting dogs, and a pit bull named Ace that he adored.
At age twenty-seven, just before leaving on his solitary trip around the world, his journal records a difficult 2:00 a.m. parting in New Orleans from a girlfriend:
Unable to appear at the Pontchartrain in such a shaken up state, I stopped at the Lee Circle Liquor Store and had about four Tom Collins and listened to Mildred Bailey sing on a recording “I Let a Song Go Out of my Heart” until I was sufficiently fortified to go home.
Admitting to distress or emotion, or whatever it was that required four strong drinks to remedy, is a rare event in the hundreds of pages of journals and letters that I found in the attic box. But, get him on the subject of Ace—now that was another matter. Almost as much journal space in July 1938 is devoted to saying good-bye to Ace as to his girlfriends, and the now-aged Ace appears in dozens of frames from the rolls of film he ran through his new Leica III.