In the early 1940s, despite my mediocre record at Christchurch School, my father set about to find a place where I might consummate my higher education. My wretched grades at Christchurch—by that I mean I had, I recall, flunked trigonometry four times in a row—made a scholarship anywhere out of the question, and since my father was paying the ticket, he felt (with great justification, I now realize) that he could determine the school I was going to attend. Anyplace north of the Potomac was unthinkable, since although my father was not really an unreconstructed Southerner (having married my mother, a lady from Pennsylvania), he was born in North Carolina only twenty-odd years after the Civil War; until his dying day his own father, my grandfather, limped from a knee wound obtained at Chancellorsville, and thus his mistrust of Yankee education was abiding and considerable. He resolved, then, that I should enroll in a college either in his native state or in Virginia, which was mine. Any institution farther south he regarded as primitive, and totally unfit for a lad of my ancestry and upbringing.
He narrowed the choices down. The University of Virginia, the most obvious option, was immediately cast aside; its reputation in regard to alcohol was more horrendous then than it is now; there were freshmen there, he had heard on good authority, who had been apprehended wandering the streets of Charlottesville in the throes of delirium tremens, and since my father sensed my own incipient predilection for the bottle, he was not about to throw me into the lion's den. Then there was William & Mary. So close at hand to my hometown, William & Mary seemed another obvious choice. But the school was eliminated on the grounds of what he called intellectual vacuity—a condition which had prevailed there ever since the founding of Phi Beta Kappa in 1776. Likewise, Washington & Lee was rejected. He found the place effete and frivolous, lacking in depth of concern for the examined life, and with some reason: after a brief visit to Lexington, he was profoundly offended by the hundreds of uniform seersucker suits and white buckskin shoes. He called them “Lightweights!” Finally, then, my father and I traveled up here to Hampden-Sydney, whose Presbyterianism and strictures about alcohol my father regarded happily. I hope you will not take it as all loose flattery when I say that I was so totally beguiled by this serene and lovely campus (it remains so, I'm happy to say, to this very day) and by the splendid easygoingness of the place, and by so much else in the human sense that was wonderfully attractive, that I said to myself: This is where I want to be. My father, I could tell, was also not immune to the charms of the school, physical and otherwise; but he was even more of a pushover for honorifics (it was one of his venial sins), and when he was informed that this venerable institution had contributed, on a per capita basis, more biographic subjects to Who’s Who in America than any college in the country, he had all but had me enrolled. But soon after this, fate intervened—fate in the form of those four consecutive F's at Christchurch. To my intense disappointment I was turned down, and so I went to another Presbyterian college—Davidson, in North Carolina, which inexplicably overlooked my academic shortcomings and gained the indifferent student that Hampden-Sydney had prudently shunned. I was not a good scholar at Davidson either.
A short time ago, while brooding on this melancholy tale, I was naturally led into thoughts of Virginia. Despite my longtime residence in the North, my native state still compels a strong hold on me. If it is true that an artist's world is largely determined by the experiences of the first two decades of his life, and this is a theory held by Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, and myself, then the Virginia which I so vividly and poignantly recall from my early years worked on me a lasting effect, made me in large measure the writer that I am. And so, as I cast about for a theme which might be appropriate to talk about, I hesitated, wondering if the simplicity of the idea that struck me might not, in its very simplicity, be inadequate. On the other hand, what I had in mind did seem to represent something profoundly important, even critical, in its significance not only for Virginia but for the future and the quality of all our lives.
I am speaking of a river, one that flows less than forty miles north of here. A nearby stream, the Appomattox, is its tributary, familiar to all of you. I am referring, of course, to the James. To the north, as it winds through Buckingham and Albemarle counties, and past the old plantation of Bremo in Fluvanna, the James is a modest and pleasant stream, a mere trickle of an unfledged watercourse meandering through the Piedmont. But down on the east bank of the lower Peninsula, where I was born and reared, the river is nearly six miles across at its widest, a vast and lonely expanse that makes up one of the broadest estuaries of any river in America. More than anything else, the James River was the absolute and dominating physical presence of my childhood and early youth. As I envision how a child growing up on the flanks of the Rockies or Sierras must ever afterward be enthralled to the memory of mountain peaks, or as I recollect how a writer like Willa Cather, brought up on the Nebraska prairies, was haunted for life by that majestically unending “sea of grass,” so for me the sheer geographical fact of the James was central to my experience, so much a part of me that even now I wonder whether some of that salty-sweet water might not have entered my bloodstream. A good deal of this, of course, had to do with the omnipresent spell of the river's prodigious history. No river in America was ever compelled to carry such an onerous burden, and we little tykes were never allowed to forget it as we sat in our classrooms overlooking the sovereign waterway itself, informed by one schoolmarm after another that yonder—just there!—Captain John Smith sailed past on his momentous journey, while just there, too, in 1619, another ship lumbered upstream with a different cargo to make the James the mother-river of Negro slavery for the whole New World. And nearby were the great river mansions—Carter's Grove, Westover, Shirley—populated with ghosts of bygone centuries.
But if the James was the past, that past coexisted with the present—and what a vital present that was! Winter, summer, spring, and fall—the river was rarely out of my sight; its presence subtly intruded on all my other senses. When I woke up on spring mornings the first thing I smelled was the river's brackish odor on the wind, a rich mingling of salt and seaweed and tidal mud, of organic matter in benign dissolution. There was the music of the river, too, diurnal sounds which wove themselves into the very fabric of village life—the cry of gulls; waves thrusting, lapping; the flapping of sails as they luffed at the pier; boat horns; and always the singsong voices of Negro oystermen as they labored above their tongs. We swam in the river from April until October; the water—partly fresh, partly oceanic—was faintly saline on the tongue, and in July it was as warm as mother's milk, and just as reassuring. The salinity, of course, accounted for the quality of the oysters; cousins to the Lynnhaven variety, they were the size of small saucers and utterly luscious to swallow; and then there were crabs. The crabs were not simply abundant; they existed in such flabbergasting profusion as to seem almost menacing. In midsummer we netted swarms of them with absurd ease from the village pier, using hunks of gamy meat for bait. When I was eleven or twelve I was a soft-shell-crab businessman; the delicious little creatures were so numerous in the mudflats of low tide that I could fill a market basket in less than an hour and then peddle these—layered with fragrant seaweed—at the back doors of the village houses, where the ladies grumbled at my exorbitant price: three cents apiece, an inflationary penny more than the previous year. I loved this big, fecund, blowsy, beautiful, erotic river. It was erotic, and I achieved with it a penultimate intimacy by nearly drowning in it in my thirteenth year, when the little boat in which I was learning to sail capsized and sank. Still, I loved the James, and in memory its summertime shores are tangled with all that piercing delight of youthful romance; recollecting the moonlight in huge quicksilver oblongs on those dark waters, and the drugstore perfume of gardenia, and boys’ and girls’ voices. I no longer wonder why the river had such a lasting effect on my spirit, becoming almost in itself a metaphor for the painful sweetness of life and its mystery.
[Excerpted from a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, May 23, 1980.]