First off, cheers to all the fathers out there. This morning I presented my own father with another one of the silk Hawaiian-print shirts he loves. I gave up trying to persuade him against them long ago. Whatever makes him happy, eh.
*****
In 1994, John Berendt, a self-professed “Yankee” writer, pulled Savannah, Georgia, into the national cultural consciousness with a (literal) bang; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, often mistaken for a novel but purely NON-fiction, is the sexually-charged tale of a murder allegedly committed by a member of Savannah’s elite circle. Anyone who reads the book, though, quickly realizes that far more important than the trial that Berendt documents is his overall literary interpretation of the city as perhaps the most southern place on earth. Berendt is not a historian (and I say, thank God in this case), so he doesn't really contextualize his work within any broader cultural, political, or economic claims about the South. He doesn't have to. Presenting a cast of beyond-eccentric characters, Berendt proposes that Savannah is a city lost within itself, isolated and forever caught in the gardenia-scented, gin-soaked mores of a mythic Old South that other places have fought to erase. He presents the one picture southern historians don't want to see. There is no progressive narrative here, and no one's even got a progressive agenda up their seersuckered sleeve. It's not a post-civil rights South, which is the South we all want to believe that we live in now.
Berendt is clearly the outsider in his own story, a willing carpetbagger; he, in turn, attracts Savannah’s odd-ducks like flies on peach juice. Some of them want to flaunt their peculiarities as if those oddities were sparkling tiaras (for a few, they actually are!), to show an intruder like Berendt that they can thrive only in a place as untouched as Savannah. The city might still be shrouded in a less-than-pretty past, but at least it allows individualism to flourish. Right?
Hmmm. If we are to believe that Savannah is actually Berendt’s southern gothic Savannah, then it is a place where blacks still stay away from whites for the most part, where the police will turn an eye to wealthy men driving with cocktails at the helms of their Cadillacs, and the hypocrisies of homophobia still thrive the way they did in, say, 1954. The best-written character in this book is the one we're sure is no-part fabrication; "The Lady" Chablis, who befriended Berendt and showed him the ropes around the city's seedier nooks, is very much a celebrated (black) Savannah Drag Queen whose mouth is as dirty as a bucket of mud. But she also takes stock in her status as a southern "lady." How does this place operate, with the gentility of a dusty noblesse oblige living next door to the elite's worst nightmares (i.e. conversing about sex, conversing about same-sex sex, having both, you get the point)? It just does, Berendt insists, and Savannah patriots don't want any help from the outside. Questioning anything would mean addressing bigger problems--racism, class-ism (it exists), raging poverty and persistent random violence.
I think Berendt writes out real stories the way that historians often should. Without the albatross of footnotes, as a writer he's able to present a sequence of events the way his mind has processed them. A few facts might be tweaked, but they're tweaked to make the story fuller, more visual, more compelling. It's emotional. I would rank Midnight in a top-ten list of works of southern history (and then I'd take unending flack from my colleagues, and maybe be expelled from the field altogether), but there's one thing about it that really bugs the hell out of me. And it bugged me even more during this most recent reading.
So Savannah residents fear change, huh? They fear outsiders? They also don't WORK in this book. Berendt is told at the beginning of his visit to stay securely within the city's main borders. So I understand why he doesn't, say, visit the paper mill nearby on the Savannah River. But did he really not encounter anyone who worked there? Because I'm pretty sure that even in the 1990s Union-Camp (formerly Union Bag, later International Paper) employed thousands of locals, both black and white. Lots of folks who work part-time in the city's flourishing tourism industry also pull hours at the mill.
Even more surprising is that Berendt doesn't discuss the industrial side of Savannah at all. Not one word. Didn't he smell the sulphur in the air? Paper mills in places like Savannah can be smelled from the highways; residents get used to it, but outsiders notice it right away. Anyway, I'm not going to dwell on his omission. My point is that the city's industrial leaders, and workers for that matter, pretty much demanded the help and guidance of an outside world starting in the 1970s. That's what the entire second half of my dissertation will be about; Ralph Nader sent it an investigative team in the summer of 1970 to test the Savannah River for pollutants and help residents gain the upper-hand against Union Camp. The elite that Berendt writes of? Yeah, the Old South-ers turned their heads. But workers, and some families who'd seen their drinking water darken, and fishermen and tree farmers in the periphery...they sure as hell wanted help to fix raging environmental problems. They had the gusto to address racial concerns as well. Imagine that (ironic voice)! A group of black workers filed a discrimination suit against Union in the 1980s...and won.
But Berendt's book confirmed the graying prophecy of main-square(s)-Savannah. In a way, he kind of lets those old white boys win. Without the smokestacks, it makes sense that Savannah could be an island. But with them...well, hello modernity and its problems. I guess that's where I come in.
End scene.
I still love the book, for the recond.
*****
In 1994, John Berendt, a self-professed “Yankee” writer, pulled Savannah, Georgia, into the national cultural consciousness with a (literal) bang; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, often mistaken for a novel but purely NON-fiction, is the sexually-charged tale of a murder allegedly committed by a member of Savannah’s elite circle. Anyone who reads the book, though, quickly realizes that far more important than the trial that Berendt documents is his overall literary interpretation of the city as perhaps the most southern place on earth. Berendt is not a historian (and I say, thank God in this case), so he doesn't really contextualize his work within any broader cultural, political, or economic claims about the South. He doesn't have to. Presenting a cast of beyond-eccentric characters, Berendt proposes that Savannah is a city lost within itself, isolated and forever caught in the gardenia-scented, gin-soaked mores of a mythic Old South that other places have fought to erase. He presents the one picture southern historians don't want to see. There is no progressive narrative here, and no one's even got a progressive agenda up their seersuckered sleeve. It's not a post-civil rights South, which is the South we all want to believe that we live in now.
Berendt is clearly the outsider in his own story, a willing carpetbagger; he, in turn, attracts Savannah’s odd-ducks like flies on peach juice. Some of them want to flaunt their peculiarities as if those oddities were sparkling tiaras (for a few, they actually are!), to show an intruder like Berendt that they can thrive only in a place as untouched as Savannah. The city might still be shrouded in a less-than-pretty past, but at least it allows individualism to flourish. Right?
Hmmm. If we are to believe that Savannah is actually Berendt’s southern gothic Savannah, then it is a place where blacks still stay away from whites for the most part, where the police will turn an eye to wealthy men driving with cocktails at the helms of their Cadillacs, and the hypocrisies of homophobia still thrive the way they did in, say, 1954. The best-written character in this book is the one we're sure is no-part fabrication; "The Lady" Chablis, who befriended Berendt and showed him the ropes around the city's seedier nooks, is very much a celebrated (black) Savannah Drag Queen whose mouth is as dirty as a bucket of mud. But she also takes stock in her status as a southern "lady." How does this place operate, with the gentility of a dusty noblesse oblige living next door to the elite's worst nightmares (i.e. conversing about sex, conversing about same-sex sex, having both, you get the point)? It just does, Berendt insists, and Savannah patriots don't want any help from the outside. Questioning anything would mean addressing bigger problems--racism, class-ism (it exists), raging poverty and persistent random violence.
I think Berendt writes out real stories the way that historians often should. Without the albatross of footnotes, as a writer he's able to present a sequence of events the way his mind has processed them. A few facts might be tweaked, but they're tweaked to make the story fuller, more visual, more compelling. It's emotional. I would rank Midnight in a top-ten list of works of southern history (and then I'd take unending flack from my colleagues, and maybe be expelled from the field altogether), but there's one thing about it that really bugs the hell out of me. And it bugged me even more during this most recent reading.
So Savannah residents fear change, huh? They fear outsiders? They also don't WORK in this book. Berendt is told at the beginning of his visit to stay securely within the city's main borders. So I understand why he doesn't, say, visit the paper mill nearby on the Savannah River. But did he really not encounter anyone who worked there? Because I'm pretty sure that even in the 1990s Union-Camp (formerly Union Bag, later International Paper) employed thousands of locals, both black and white. Lots of folks who work part-time in the city's flourishing tourism industry also pull hours at the mill.
Even more surprising is that Berendt doesn't discuss the industrial side of Savannah at all. Not one word. Didn't he smell the sulphur in the air? Paper mills in places like Savannah can be smelled from the highways; residents get used to it, but outsiders notice it right away. Anyway, I'm not going to dwell on his omission. My point is that the city's industrial leaders, and workers for that matter, pretty much demanded the help and guidance of an outside world starting in the 1970s. That's what the entire second half of my dissertation will be about; Ralph Nader sent it an investigative team in the summer of 1970 to test the Savannah River for pollutants and help residents gain the upper-hand against Union Camp. The elite that Berendt writes of? Yeah, the Old South-ers turned their heads. But workers, and some families who'd seen their drinking water darken, and fishermen and tree farmers in the periphery...they sure as hell wanted help to fix raging environmental problems. They had the gusto to address racial concerns as well. Imagine that (ironic voice)! A group of black workers filed a discrimination suit against Union in the 1980s...and won.
But Berendt's book confirmed the graying prophecy of main-square(s)-Savannah. In a way, he kind of lets those old white boys win. Without the smokestacks, it makes sense that Savannah could be an island. But with them...well, hello modernity and its problems. I guess that's where I come in.
End scene.
I still love the book, for the recond.
[Also...rent the 1997 film adaptation. It's directed by Clint Eastwood, and it's John Cusack at his khacki-clad best.]
No comments:
Post a Comment