I left South Carolina and hugged the Georgia coast and the Gulf coast of Florida for a few days. I was on my way to Mississippi and New Orleans for more site visits related to my Smith research, in particular to pursue his affinity for Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner.
Coastal towns are more appealing in winter. The light is clear, the air crisp, and the off-season demographic atrophy reveals a town’s cultural skeleton and a more discernible pulse. In a small bar at the Village Inn on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, I listened to three older couples—all New York transplants, I learned—enjoy a familiar chat with the African-American bartender, who had grown up across the sound, in Brunswick. Clearly, this scene has been repeated, maybe for years. Another New Yorker, a customer at a crafts and antiques store across the street, made a splendid recommendation on the best seafood dive in town.
I left the island and made a daylong meander across south Georgia to Apalachicola, Florida, stopping to visit little stores here and there, to get hot water for tea, or just to soak up the sepia winter light. The route included towns such as Nahunta, Hoboken, Waycross, Manor, Argyle, Homerville, Du Pont, Stockton, Naylor, Valdosta, and Quitman. It felt like I was seeing sites I’d never see again, either because I’d never come back or because next time everything would be gone. What’s left behind after decades of farm attrition are churches and desperation. In Waynesville, a topless bar called Hootersville sat next door to the corrugated-aluminum Family Life Church, both looking repurposed and fleeting.
If the losers in the downsizing of southern American agriculture are the small towns, the winner is the landscape, wilder now perhaps than since the jungle was first cleared for farming several centuries ago. With the low winter sun shining sideways against upright surfaces—trees, weeds, barns and farmhouses and stores—the light colored scenes of decay. Even the small mounds of Georgia’s red dirt cast little shadows, changing color and texture depending on whether they were front- or side- or backlit by the sun. In overcast conditions, a beautiful gray-brown filter was laid down over everything. If well-to-do Europeans once sent their infirm to the South of France to be healed by the sun and fresh air, the rural American South would be a good place to do that today.
* * *
After dark, I spent a couple of hours walking around downtown Apalachicola, a bygone coastal village known for oysters. The temperature was in the forties and fog filled the empty streets, blurring the Christmas lights. Owls called to one another. I followed the sounds of one pair until I was standing underneath a cell phone tower on the edge of downtown. Two owls were up there, hidden in the night fog. I listened to the perfectly repeating intervals of their call-and-response patterns, mesmerized. The next morning, I pulled the Impala onto Highway 98 and headed west along the Gulf shore.
* * *
Mississippi and New Orleans were on my horizon. Light in August and A Streetcar Named Desire were on my mind, which is to say, Gene Smith was back in the mix. The morality and narrative techniques of Faulkner and Williams influenced Smith’s photography: he taped the text of Faulkner’s Nobel speech to the wall above his desk in his dilapidated Sixth Avenue loft.
My destination was Laurel, Mississippi, southeast of Jackson and northeast of New Orleans. Laurel was the hometown of Streetcar’s fictional characters Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella, and the site of their family estate, Belle Reve. It was Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve after the war that sent her to steamy, bedraggled New Orleans to stay with Stella and her husband, Stanley Kowalski. The rest is theater history. I wanted to spend some time in Laurel and then follow Blanche’s path into New Orleans.
The specter of Williams, beyond the nude-pool frolic that Smith photographed, has woven in and out of my research on Smith over the past few years. Whenever the playwright or his work showed up on radio or TV, Smith rolled his reel-to-reel tape recorder. He also wrote desperate letters to Elia Kazan, director of Streetcar and Camino, semiveiled pleas for help to, he thought, a kindred soul.
In Streetcar, Tennessee Williams has Blanche exclaim a line that could have come from one of Smith’s letters or telegrams: “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be the truth.”
Blanche’s nemesis was Stanley, the archetypical midcentury bowling-and-poker-night white male, a war veteran, a beer-and-a-shot shift worker who—post-Depression, postwar—suddenly had cultural value as a consumer. The advertisements in Henry Luce’s Life were aimed at men like him and their wives, people who found within their reach a higher rung. Thus, Life was Gene Smith’s Stanley Kowalski, an inexorable, tormenting mainstream force. For two of his classic photo-essays—“Country Doctor” (1948) and “Nurse Midwife” (1951)—Smith ventured to remote regions in search of a different truth, to illustrate the anti-Stanley, the heroic, earnest dignity of solitary caregivers. It was the impulse of a romantic trying to show a better way. Like Blanche, Smith ended up in an asylum, twice.
Before I left home, Allan Gurganus had recommended that I take the audiobook of Light in August read by the actor Will Patton on my trip. Allan went on to compare Blanche DuBois to that novel’s Lena Grove, pregnant and wandering around Mississippi looking for the father of her baby. Faulkner and Williams both hailed from “nice” families a few generations down on their luck, Gurganus told me. The drive and ambition they attribute to their very different heroines, in Light in August and in Streetcar, reflect their own strange fates. The old order has faded and a new one is taking rank. These men were geniuses, born into dream-prone minor tribes from little towns in a defeated region. So Lena’s search for a father for her child and Blanche’s wish for the security of an oil tycoon who’ll spoil her mirror their creators’ quests. Each made a knight’s gambit, each going in search of acknowledgment, recognition, a place of honor and dignity, a place to stand, in the reconfigured modern world.
* * *
The founding industry in Laurel was logging, the bastard cousin of farming. The entire state of Mississippi was essentially cleared for farming, making it the third-largest timber-producing state at one time. Today, the population of Laurel has stabilized at around 18,000 after being 25,000 in 1970.
I drove the Impala around town for three days, and it felt like there was a jacked-up pickup truck on my tail the whole time, uncomfortably close. I couldn’t shake them off. Constantly checking the rearview mirror, irritated, I would pull over to let one monster truck pass only to find another one immediately sniffing my tail.
I checked into Wisteria, a bed-and-breakfast in a historic white-columned mansion on a classic hardwood-canopied street near downtown, across the street from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, which was founded in 1923 as a memorial to the Rogers timber family. The Rogers is as appealing a small museum as you’ll ever find, with a terrific library and an unusually good collection of European and American art. In the half-abandoned downtown, with Christmas decorations making things seem more forlorn, not less, I found two upscale restaurants and a coffee shop with fine tea and baked goods and Wi-Fi.
The next morning, over a delicious breakfast of eggs, fruit, and sausage, I told the seventy-something B&B owner, Earl, that later in the day I was heading to Mize, a town of a few hundred people about thirty miles northwest of Laurel, to look for a relative’s grave. Earl blinked and his face pruned with concern. I wouldn’t be caught there after dark with those plates on your car, he told me. My rented Impala had Maryland plates, randomly. That place—Sullivan’s Hollow [“holler,” Earl pronounced it]—is not known to be friendly to outsiders. He paused then added, Oh, well, you’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as it used to be.
* * *
Transfixed by Will Patton’s performance of Light in August, I began the process of tracking him down. By the time he called me from his apartment near Union Square, I was packing to leave New Orleans and to finish my Southern sojourn evoking Gene Smith.
Patton was born in South Carolina, and today he divides his time among Manhattan, the North Carolina mountains, and the South Carolina coast. He has a naturally subtle and pliable Southern accent, perfect for the varying voices and multiplying narratives of Light in August. He’s not just performing the role of narrator, or characters like Joe Christmas or Lena Grove. He performs the whole complexity of Faulkner, with a hypnotic pacing of blues.
The first thing Patton wanted to tell me was the geographic irony of his reading experience: They sent a limo to pick me up each day here at my apartment [in Union Square]. They drove me to a banal industrial warehouse area somewhere near Newark, New Jersey, and there I went inside and read Faulkner’s prose about rural Mississippi. Something about that struck me as oddly comic. But once I started reading I forgot where I was. It took several days or a week of full-time reading to get it done. I knew it would be demanding, quite a challenge.
Patton then mused on the draw of Faulkner for him.
One of the gifts my father, a former minister, gave me was a love for Faulkner. Go Down, Moses was the first book that really got inside of me when I was a kid, and it never let me go. Then I read everything.
Reading Light in August for the microphone was a process of letting that book move through me. It enters your brain and your heart and comes out through your voice. It’s a very intense experience. You live the book. It’s a great privilege to be inside a work of art like that.
I couldn’t live through Smith’s photographs in the way Patton did Faulkner’s words. Photography is a different medium, the outcomes meant to be looked at, not so much performed like words or musical notes. Listening to Light in August, I could understand why Smith owned virtually the entire catalog of Caedmon Records, why he repeatedly played aloud the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Miller, and others. For more than two weeks of driving, Faulkner’s words through Patton’s voice intoxicated me. I found myself longing for the next back road where I could let the words saturate me. I would pick up a twenty-four-ounce Budweiser or Miller High Life can, drive to a remote site, park, shut off the engine, and just listen.