My Generation (8 page)

As much as I felt a friend and ally in the Chief, I still hesitated to state my case against Klotz, upon whom my rage and loathing grew more grimly focused, if that was possible, at every item Moss disclosed. I didn't want to strain the rapport I had with Moss by attacking his superior—for all I knew, though only God would know why, he might hold Klotz in high esteem. At the same time, the evil suspicions that sprang to mind as Moss murmured his litany of details had actually begun to make me a little nauseated, taking the glow off my euphoria, and there was no way I could let the suspicions rest. I said, “You know, Chief, he wanted to find the worst things. I guess I was too intimidated to tell him I've had that little scar on my dick all my life.” Then I said, “Anyway, what this means is that Dr. Klotz could have told me there was a possibility of a false positive. A possibility.” I paused. “But he didn't do that.”

“That's really right.” Moss didn't wait an extra beat, uttering the words with a soft, rising inflection that had a distinct edge of contempt and carried its own conviction of wrongdoing. I knew then that he was on my side.

“He's read what you've read,” I persisted. “He knew about Vincent's disease. He could have run me through that drill, couldn't he? But he didn't do that, either. He could have spared me a lot of misery. He could have given me some hope—”

“That's really right.”

“What is this jerk's problem, Chief?”

Klotz was on leave. Within a few hours I would return to the barracks and the drill field, just another healthy recruit thrust back into the maw of the war machine. I would never see the Chief again. Under the circumstances, it would be safe for Moss to give voice to whatever innermost feelings he had toward Klotz. But Moss was too much the wise old salt, too professional, and, doubtless, too loyal to an honorable code to go that far. Still, I sensed a comradely affinity, and it was denunciation enough, a spiritual handclasp, when he squinted at me and said, “He was punishin' you, boy, punishin' you.”

As I left the hospital that day, I looked forward to the ordeal that my phantom illness had interrupted. Mean corporals with taut shiny scalps and bulging eyes would be at me again, poking their swagger sticks into my solar plexus, ramming their knees up my butt, calling me a cocksucker and a motherfucking sack of shit, terrorizing me with threats and drenching me with spittle and hatred, making my quotidian world such a miasma of fright that each night I would crawl into my bed like an invalid seeking death, praying for resurrection in another life. After that, there was the bloody Pacific, where I would murder and perhaps be murdered. But those were horrors I could deal with; in that gray ward I'd nearly been broken by fears that were beyond imagining.

Late that afternoon, I trudged past the drill field in the waning light, packing my seabag on my shoulder, hefting a load that seemed pounds lighter than it had a month before. At the far end of the field, a platoon of marines was tramping across the asphalt, counting in cadence, a chorus of young voices over which one voice, the drill instructor's, soared in a high maniacal wail. In some undiscoverable distance, faint yet clear, a band played the “Colonel Bogey March,” that jauntily sad evocation of warfare, its brassy harmonies mingling triumph and grief. The music made me walk along with a brisk step, and I felt it hurrying me toward a future where though suffering was a certainty, it wore a recognizable face.

I had just enough time for a stop at the PX, to stock up on cigarettes and candy bars. The candy was a clandestine indulgence I felt I owed myself, and couldn't resist. Nor could I resist, along with the Baby Ruths, buying a postcard showing a photograph of marines grinning insincerely as they performed calisthenics, and the caption “Greetings from Parris Island.” Toward Christmas I addressed it to my stepmother, and scribbled:

Dear Old Girl,

My frantic, obsessive copulations produced not syphilis but trench mouth. (Escaped from the Clap Shack in time to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior.)

Much love, Bill

[
New Yorker
, September 18, 1995.]

G
eorge Washington, never so versatile and wide-ranging in his interests as Thomas Jefferson, was nonetheless a man of many parts who knew well how to employ his leisure time. Firmly implanted in the American mythology is Washington the solemn, taciturn soldier and statesman, the Rembrandt Peale portrait of the postage stamps; less well known is the pre-Revolutionary Virginia planter who was devoted equally to horse racing and the theater and who regularly traveled the hundred and fifty miles south from Mount Vernon across the somnolent Tidewater to Williamsburg—then the capital of the colony—where he placed bets on the horses by day, and by night attended performances of Shakespeare by troupes imported from London. If today one should wonder how that Tidewater countryside appeared to Washington's eyes, the answer is: much as it does now. For to a degree largely unmatched in America, the region resembles in topography its ancient, earliest configuration.

It is the oldest part of our country, and suffered its upheaval and exploitation not in the nineteenth century like New England nor in the present century like California, but decades before we became a nation. Recklessly overcultivated in tobacco for more than a century, the once-rich bottomlands and green fields became fallow and depleted, so that even by the time of Washington's later years the abandoned farms and pastures were becoming reclaimed by new growths of woodland—oak and ash and sycamore and
scrub pine. Long before the invention of the steam locomotive, much of the region—especially in the northern reaches, in the area just south of the Potomac and bordering on Chesapeake Bay—had subsided into the lazy sleep of a depopulated backwater, lacking either industry or productive agriculture, and for this reason (somewhat rare in the pattern of American regional growth), the absence of factories and railroads and great superhighways left the landscape mercifully unmarked. For this reason, too, the Tidewater has retained, generally speaking, a unique, unspoiled loveliness. Of course, architectural styles have changed the face of the landscape; shopping centers and split-level houses, indistinguishable from those elsewhere in America, have set their imprint here and there upon the land, and one should not visit the Tidewater in the expectation that each small town will yield a glimpse of something resembling Colonial Williamsburg or a Christopher Wren church. Also, the sprawling industrial and military complex that has grown up around Norfolk and Hampton Roads does not represent the quality of the Tidewater of which I speak.

Nevertheless, the old mansions and the eighteenth-century courthouses and churches still exist, their weathered brick rising out of the countryside from behind a grove of oaks in the most pleasantly disarming way. Such great old manor houses as Westover and Brandon and Carter's Grove still reign in lordly and stunning elegance along the banks of the James (these are the homes that H. L. Mencken, in outrage over the encroachment of all that was hideous in American architecture, described as the most perfectly proportioned dwellings ever fashioned by man).

Yet beyond all these noble relics of the past, there is the landscape itself, sometimes unspectacular and ordinary (cornfields, pine woods, country stores) but more often possessing a sorrowing beauty—everywhere lovelier and more mellow and melancholy and fledged with green than the hard-clay country that dominates the higher elevations of the Upper South. All this has to do, of course, with the rivers, the noble waterways that indent the face of the Tidewater and give the region so much of its character, including, indeed, its very name. Rarely here is one more than a few miles from a great brackish tideland stream, like the Rappahannock or the York or the James (and these are monumental rivers, too, in breadth if not in length: the James at its mouth is nearly six miles across, one of the widest estuaries in America), so that what is specifically Southern becomes commingled with the waterborne, the maritime. Thus the vistas of the solitary stands of pinewoods
and barren cornfields, the sawmill in a remote clearing, the sudden immaculate and simple beauty of a freshly painted clapboard Negro church in a sunny grove are combined with a sense of broad, flat reaches of tidal shallows, mighty river estuaries, fish stakes and oyster boats, inlets and coves and bays, wild sudden squalls blowing out of the Chesapeake, the serene magnificence of sunrise coming up over the mouth of the Rappahannock, blood-red through the milk of morning mists. This is a low, drowsing, placid topography, literally half drowned. From the exhausted land the people have turned to the water for sustenance—river and estuary and bay. There is an odd truth in the remark that every native of the Tidewater is a skilled boatman, even if he is a farmer.

I love the place-names of the Virginia Tidewater—that juxtaposition of the Indian and old England, which is more mellifluous and striking than any other place in America. The names of the counties alone are resonant with the past: Essex and Middlesex and York, Isle of Wight and Sussex, King William, Surry, Prince George, King and Queen. These are mingled with the ancestral names of the red men, who still exist in diminishing numbers, isolated on small reservations, where they make a modest living by fishing for the fat shad that still teem in the rivers bearing their tribal names: Pamunkey and Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Powhatan and Kecoughtan, Chuckatuck and Corotoman. Names like these have a lazy beauty, corresponding to the meandering pace of a bygone era.

Yet at the same time, no place of comparable area owns such an abundance of curiously or fancifully named hamlets and villages—Ark, Rescue, Ordinary, Naxera, Shadow, Zuni, Lively (the posted speed here is five miles an hour), Bumpass. These are often nothing more than a crossroads, a general store with a post office, and here one is most likely to hear the throaty, slurred Tidewater speech—beyond doubt the speech of the Father of His Country. Encapsulated in time and space, the natives of the remoter reaches of this part of Virginia still use the phonetic forms of a language spoken two and a half centuries ago by their ancestors, settlers from Devon and Dorset. Its quality cannot be fully savored unless heard, but it may be suggested by noting that in the Tidewater you never go out but “oot,” and that “house” rhymes less directly with “mouse” than with “noose.” Still occasionally heard is the “yar” sound, in which “garden” becomes “gyarden,” “far” turns into “fyah,” and that old family name of Carter, one of Virginia's most illustrious, is transmuted into “Cyatah.” This locution was, in my childhood, largely the
property of old ladies fragrant with lavender—usually Daughters of the Confederacy—and still hovers in my memory as the quintessential sound of Southern womanhood and good breeding. Alas, it is dying out and will soon be gone forever, absorbed into the flattened-out tonality of Basic American.

Neither the Tidewater nor the rest of Virginia is, of course, the Deep South, but the underlying quality of the region remains, ultimately, distinctly Southern, adumbrated by the memory of a tragic past. Some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War were fought on this soil, the selfsame soil to which there was brought for the first time—at Jamestown, in 1619, in the form of a handful of African slaves—the institution that became, in large part, the basis for that awful conflict. The legacy still remains. A majority of the Tidewater counties is heavily populated by Negroes; in many counties Negroes outnumber whites in a ratio resembling parts of Alabama and Mississippi. Here, as elsewhere in the South (and the North), there are grievous inequities; it is not in order to minimize those inequities that I reflect on the fact that no part of the South where such a racial composition is found has been so free of friction or strife. The Ku Klux Klan has never found a welcome here; the reign of terror that swept the South in the 1920s and 1930s—the decades of blazing crosses and lynchings—would have been unthinkable in the Tidewater.

I suggest that over the reach of decades a certain way of life may produce attitudes—a sense of fair play, an abhorrence of violence, a respect for the dignity of men—that supersede all other considerations and come to dominate moral conduct. However strongly it may be argued that this is not enough, it remains a tradition to be reckoned with, and the Virginia Tidewater lays justifiable claim to such a heritage. The region possesses the shortcomings common to all places, but the land and its people have achieved a certain harmony. Perhaps more than in any other comparable part of America, men have learned to get along with one another. It would be a pleasant irony if the land where the American dilemma began—close by the shores of the tranquil and lovely James, with its memory of black chained cargoes—should by its way of life come to embody an answer to that same dilemma.

[
McCall's
, July 1968.]

I
n 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.]