Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  This world’s “cozy mythologies” and corrupted innocence are clearest in poems that compare Florida present to the Florida vanished (each generation repays with nostalgia what its parents would have thought chintzy and modern, another kind of loss). Donald Justice was born in Miami, perhaps the only poet of reputation born in the state, and so suffered its losses as no tourist or latecomer could. (He once said at a reading in his hometown, “I miss Miami when I’m away, and,” following a pause, “I miss it when I’m here.”) “Childhood” ends with a memory of the outskirts of the city, where, after the collapse of the boom, planned developments had never been built:

  And everywhere

  The fine sand burning into the bare heels

  With which I learn to crush, going home,

  The giant sandspurs of the vacant lots.

  Iridescences of mosquito hawks

  Glimmer above brief puddles filled with skies,

  Tropical and changeless. And sometimes,

  Where the city halts, the cracked sidewalks

  Lead to a coral archway still spanning

  The entrance to some wilderness of palmetto—

  Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names!

  Those then-unfinished suburbs, identified in a note as Buena Vista, Opa-Locka, and others, now lie deep within the city limits. In another poem, a sonnet drawing on Henry James’s notebooks, the aging author relaxes at a hotel in California, having crossed the American continent (on the same visit that produced his mournful travelogue The American Scene). He has come home and yet not found a home to come to, a European who has lost faith in the newness of the American enterprise: “Not that he foresees immediate disaster, / Only a sort of freshness being lost—/ Or should he go on calling it Innocence?” There again is that loss of American innocence.

  One of Justice’s students wrote a pendant sonnet based on James’s journey to Florida, using (as did his teacher) some of James’s phrases. This tangle of licensed homage and clandestine borrowing betrays how innocence may be invented in the language of guilt:

  And even at the moment one resolved

  Not to come back, the scent of fruit and flowers

  Brought on a sadness as the past dissolved:

  Arcades, courts, arches, fountains, lordly towers. …

  The shore of sunset and the palms, meanwhile—

  Late shade giving over to greater shade—

  What were they? With what did they have to do?

  It was like a myriad pictures of the Nile,

  But with a History yet to be made,

  A world already lost that was still new.

  (Joe Bolton, “Florida Twilight, 1905”)

  Here the buildings vanish at sunset, architecture laid down tentatively on pristine Nature. The odor of those flowers brings on the sadness of a present unable to make terms with the past: that world always new, but now always lost, too.

  This alien and exotic world had to be found before it was lost. Though Florida appeared in many poems before the twentieth century, few poets had actually seen the place. The earliest poetic references are to a land encountered in books and therefore already part historical fiction, however begemmed and begummed with fact. One hears the distant echo of those early tales in James’s lament that, even in his day, the “novelists improvise, with the aid of the historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and sword-play and gallantry and passion.” So Thomas Greepe, perhaps the first in a long line of fantasists, in 1587:

  Then homeward as their course did lie,

  At sundry Iles they put a shore:

  Their former wantes for to supply,

  With victuales and fresh water store.

  At Florida they did ariue:

  Saint Augustine for to atchiue;

  or Anne Dowriche, in 1589: “‘Great matters moue our minde against the King of Spaine, / For he hath taken Florida, and late our sister slaine.’” Nathaniel Baxter, in 1606, absorbed this pastoral state within a convenient pastoral mythology:

  These foure followed blessed Cynthia,

  To view the gardens of Hesperida.

  With many another honourable Dame,

  Blessed Phileta, Clara, Candida;

  These lodge within the house of Cynthia,

  Within the Lande of Terra Florida.

  Such were the purposes of polemical statecraft or enchanted allegory for which the shores of Florida could be enlisted. Only gradually did it become, in poems, a land lush to the point of surfeit. Laurence Eusden, in 1722: “But let th’Italian Canvass vital glow, / And FLORIDA her woven Plumage show” (“woven Plumage” is a delicious touch). Ebenezer Elliott, in 1818, knew how, in search of the sublime, to employ the Keatsian strain:

  There is a lovely vision in her soul,

  Delicious as the gale of Florida

  Which, over fragrance, bears the tiny bird,

  The feather’d bee, dipp’d in the morning—Aye,

  But she is human! and Reality

  Shall wake her from that dream, to agonize.

  So, more haplessly, in out-of-date Augustan couplets, did the American poet John Pierpont, in 1829:

  Hear yon poetic pilgrim of the west,

  Chant Music’s praise, and to her power attest.

  Who now, in Florida’s untrodden woods,

  Bedecks, with vines of jessamine, her floods,

  And flowery bridges o’er them loosely throws.

  Such observation, which may not have been firsthand, reveals the familiarity with local flora and fauna necessary for backdrops to a modern mythos. (James asked, about Florida, “what the play would have been without the scenery.”) Distance did not prevent poets, especially those lounging comfortably across an ocean, from continuing to apply that scenery to romantic venture. Here in 1838 is Robert Southey, the poet laureate, who when young wanted to emigrate with Coleridge to the banks of the Susquehanna:

  But he to Florida’s disastrous shores

  In evil hour his gallant comrades led,

  Through savage woods and swamps, and hostile tribes,

  The Apalachian arrows, and the snares

  Of wilier foes, hunger, and thirst, and toil.

  Even the young Tennyson provided lines keen on the invasion of the frigid north by the lushness of a passive south: “Ev’n as the warm gulf-stream of Florida / Floats far away into the Northern seas / The lavish growths of southern Mexico.”

  Amid so much of serious purpose, however ill favored or ill formed, I cannot bear to omit a Byronic satire that pours cold water on such romantic effusions. The American poet John Townsend Trowbridge, in 1878:

  He had come down at first as far as Florida,

  And seen the alligator and flamingo;

  Then, passing on to regions somewhat torrider,

  Reached the French-negro side of San Domingo, And learned a little of the curious lingo

  The people speak there, but conceived no mighty

  Love for those Black Republicans of Hayti.

  The politics are suspect now, but torrider and Florida makes you want to read the rhyme royal of the whole epic, called Guy Vernon. Not until relatively late did poems about the Sunshine State, as it now styles itself, save themselves from embarrassment; and even then there was ample scope for disaster. Paul Laurence Dunbar plumbed the depths of humiliation in racial dialect: “Florida is lovely, she ’s de fines’ lan’ / Evah seed de sunlight f’om de Mastah’s han’, / ’Ceptin’ fu’ de varmints an’ huh fleas an’ san’.” Langston Hughes’s “Florida Road Workers” and a number of brief poems by William Carlos Williams are, if possible, even worse.

  For the better part of three centuries, then, Florida existed almost entirely outside firsthand knowledge, a tabula rasa on which the poetic imagination might inscribe itself. Like all lands imagined, it was Narcissus’s pool: if you looked too deeply, at last you saw yourself. Eventually poets who had seen this absurd, sandy peninsula began to describe it, at times blinded by the beauty of subtropics ever more tropical, u
sing it as so many Jamesian backdrops:

  Here has my salient faith annealed me.

  Out of the valley, past the ample crib

  To skies impartial, that do not disown me

  Nor claim me, either, by Adam’s spine—nor rib.

  The oar plash, and the meteorite’s white arch

  Concur with wrist and bicep. In the moon

  That now has sunk I strike a single march

  To heaven or hades—to an equally frugal noon.

  (Hart Crane, “Key West”)

  This might as well be Finland as Florida. Most of Crane’s “Key West: An Island Sheaf” shows little interest in the place, except as it can be turned into archly mythic fantasy (he was not an abstraction blooded, as R. P. Blackmur said of Stevens, but an abstraction that bled to death). His gift was never one for observation and detail; but here he seems like a steam shovel, clearing the swamps for a gimcrack strip-mall of his own design.

  Sometimes it is hard to see beyond such florid surrounds; in views so lushly baroque, the language may be infected—infested!—by what it would describe:

  A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

  To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs

  Poor white the soil like talcum mixed with grit

  But up came polymorphous green

  No sooner fertilized than clipped

  Where glimmerings from buried nozzles rose

  And honey gravel driveways led

  To the perpetual readiness of tombs

  (James Merrill, “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-of-War”)

  You want to say, How lovely! And then you think, How sad! Merrill’s eye is always being caught by something, his very language an act of flaunting possession; yet Nature’s tangled bank and Palm Beach’s clipped lawns threaten to become mere show, playing endless matinees to manatees. If the reader is suspicious of splendor so indulged, so indulged in, that is what Florida offers: excess without guilt, sin without price. When the exotic is your address, it’s difficult not to recognize the there there; but the words may become immersed in the vacuous sensuality on ready display—then there’s no more than there there. The sensuality of language necessarily holds life at a distance—the artist cannot embrace the model while he paints.

  Gaze is a fraught term in criticism now, one perhaps impossible to restore to innocence; yet consider Elizabeth Bishop’s coolly calculating appraisal of her surroundings:

  White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

  and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

  Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

  the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,

  the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

  One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

  one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

  (“The Bight”)

  The ribs protrude and glare, seemingly the bones of some great prehistoric creature—is that sunlit reflection or a hostile stare? If the latter, the observer cannot escape being seen (how easily Bishop turns the view back upon herself while fending it off—she has it both ways, a hard-boiled reporter with a heart of Spanish moss). The pilings seem about to go up in flame; the poor water cannot wet anything. And then the scent of gas—how adroitly the poet lets that faint whiff of danger (or suicide) linger, only to turn it into a joke. The mortal thoughts shadow the comic antics that follow:

  The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

  into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,

  it seems to me, like pickaxes,

  rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

  and going off with humorous elbowings.

  For all Bishop’s lightness, these lines are haunted by fatality, as if she could not help trying to ease life’s tragedy with a few humorous asides (or dampen its comedy by reminding us of the tragic). Her clownish pelicans crash about like the Marx Brothers and in the end get little for their labors. Her observations, more standoffish than Merrill’s or Crane’s, suggest how much of a poem’s inner life is created entirely by imagery. Bishop does not fail to see through the exotic to a deeper discontent—or, in that vulnerable way of hers, to be seen despite the exotic for what she is.

  Other poets have applied the wry view of the solitary to more voyeuristic, Lowellesque scenes:

  Six girls round the pool in Stranglers weather,

  tanning; then three; then one (my favourite!),

  every so often misting herself

  or taking a drink of ice water from a plastic beaker.

  Only the pool shark ever swam,

  humming, vacuuming debris, cleverly avoiding its tail.

  The white undersides of the mockingbirds

  flashed green when they flew over.

  (Michael Hofmann, “Freebird”)

  The Stranglers are a British punk band, though the poet may be thinking of the murders of female undergraduates about that time. This would be an innocent appreciation of youth and beauty, if the observer did not linger so long. The girl misting herself is damp with the promise of eros. On a beach such scenes might be different; but the speaker is probably unseen, perhaps peeping through his blinds.

  The frat boy overhead gave it to his sorority girl steamhammer-style.

  Someone turned up the Lynyrd Skynyrd,

  the number with the seven-minute instrumental coda.

  Her little screams petered out, inachevée.

  Those unapproachable sirens, that sorority girl taken “steamhammer-style,” her modest yelps of pleasure not quite reaching climax, make the surrounding loneliness all the lonelier. The speaker’s detachment becomes a kind of longing. Though his sardonic and amused judgments embrace the soul with Terentian generosity (“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”), this is life lived almost without hope (the darkness is in the form of observation), not despite the surrounding narcissism and sexual congress but because of them.

  One who lives in a state of nature, which is rarely a state of grace, may be tempted to discover there the hidden layers of the self (I once heard a poet say that walking on a swampy Florida prairie was like walking in the Unconscious), to read into landscape his own tortured predicament.

  When I poked the wet, mahogany mud,

  it felt like something human I had my hand on,

  as if the earth were a girl’s black-haired head

  being lifted up in a great clatter that ebbed

  and flowed, like sea foam or a red sky or pain

  obscuring pleasure in a flesh tunnel.

  (Henri Cole, “Medusa”)

  Here the creation myth has been spliced into a myth more troubling. (Wasn’t Freud an adept of the sailor’s splice?) At first that seems to be Eve rising from the mortal mud, created from virgin earth as Adam was; but the title shoulders the meaning aside. The black hair must be snakes, the great clatter that of the wood storks the poem has already mentioned. This is a woman part animal (how appropriate for a state gone feral), one you cannot look upon without dying—an inversion of birth, where you cannot look upon your mother without being born. The poem ends on that vulgar and unromantic “flesh tunnel,” sexual pleasure set at one with the nature surrounding it, but made merely flesh, mortal and a little disgusting. The line that precedes this passage now makes sense: “as if freedom meant proximity to danger” (all sorts of dangers tremble within sex, from Medusa’s stare to AIDS). Cole’s poems are often about a love once called unnatural: here lies the secret, the turn—perhaps the flesh tunnel is not a woman’s after all. Flora and fauna have been pressed into service (pressurized, as the British say, where we would say pressured), the poem set deep into its own humorless pain, darkly wounded, finding no solace in revelation.

  What unites these uses (or abuses) of local mythos is how they have been determined by outsiders, those who have only visited, those who have come and found an uneasy home amid the otherness. Florida lay beyond the reach of the original thirteen colonies—it w
as foreign ground until 1821. For decades after, much of it remained terra incognita. The original inhabitants had been almost entirely killed off by disease, and the lower Creeks (later called Seminoles) who moved there in the early eighteenth century found a primeval emptiness. The noxious, mosquito-infested swamps kept settlement slow (disease was a problem throughout the Caribbean—during the Spanish-American War, yellow fever and malaria killed more soldiers than enemy guns).

  Whitman felt the lure of this strange, exotic place, part of and yet somehow separate from that great poem, America:

  A lesser proof than old Voltaire’s, yet greater,

  Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse, America,

  To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow,

  Brought safely for a thousand miles o’er land and tide,

  Some three days since on their own soil live-sprouting,

  Now here their sweetness through my room unfolding,

  A bunch of orange buds by mail from Florida.

  (“Orange Buds by Mail from Florida”)

  Here we have a Whitman surprised, tender, curious, content to know strange places from afar, not the blowhard who pretended, however compellingly, to have been places where he’d never set foot. (The “hut” has been humbly reduced for his audience, but how fast the mails were in those days!) In the Calamus poems, he wrote, “Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida as it hung trailing down.” This might seem a fraud genial enough, as he’d never been closer to Florida than New Orleans; yet consider this longer fantasy:

  O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!

  O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!