PAT CONROY'S CHARLESTON

air bellows drive-thru art museum

 

Reading in Pat Conroy's novel published in 2009, South of Broad, takes me back to the place I once lived from 1964 to 1976, Charleston, SC. They were the years of my education at the College of Charleston and working in bookstores, knowing people, a regular at cocktail parties, friends who are still friends today, two having left the body recently. The time was the last years of the Old South Charleston and the first years of the New South Charleston. The New South arrived in the middle of my time there. Charleston  now is a city entirely different from the Charleston I knew. I can't say I prefer one to the other. Each has its own character. I liked the casual, slow way of the Old South. I liked about Old South Charleston the working class, middle class and ruling class all lived around the corner from each other. Little neighborhood stores sprinkled around the peninsula on the order of country stores sprinkled around the county in the Blue Ridge.  

 

 

 

South of Broad is my first Conroy novel. Broad St in Charleston runs an east to west line across the peninsula, below which the white well-to-do live, above which everybody else lives. In Old South Charleston it was fashionable to let the houses go without fresh paint. It was also fashion among men in suits not to have polished shoes. It was about 1970 when the fashion switched to freshly painted houses, painted by Vietnamese refugees who did good work for good pay, and men in suits began wearing polished shoes. Charleston went from weary, worn out and left out to a gem of a city which may be the most beautiful city in the country. Last time I visited, it was magnificent. The city has become a theme park of itself. Rich outsiders buy expensive south of Broad property and expect to be swept into Charleston society. They learn a good lesson in the trickery of expectations.

 

 

 

Conroy's story in South of Broad began in the middle of my time there, the year I graduated from C of C. I know the streets that come up in the course of the story, the houses, the businesses, the law offices, the Coast Guard station, the bridges, the culture, the black and white tension. I don't know more than a handful of people there now and they've probably forgotten me. I committed to the mountains absolutely, without looking back. It was a chopping block change. Someone I only slightly knew said before I left I'd be back in January. The only thing I could say to that was, You don't know me. It's fun, forty years after, looking back at the city I loved passing through. I don't think I could have lived out my life there with much satisfaction. I needed the hills. I had a kind of unconscious longing for the mountains, more for the abstraction than for the actuality, which I learned as time went by.

 

 

Conroy's story is very much Charleston. He has a cross-section of the city's population in his characters, close friends in a group, facets that reflect the various aspects of the gem that the city is. Conroy's analysis of the city is experienced. The way he writes about the people in his story tells me he pays attention to the people around him. He has learned human nature well. He's good at writing conversations. I'm appreciating Conroy as a writer more with every sitting. I'm two-thirds through it, having a hard time putting it down every time I pick it up. It's a good story well told. I'm glad he wrote a Charleston novel. I don't know anything about the world of books and writers anymore. Earlier this evening, I watched the 1983 movie made from his early novel, The Lords Of Discipline. It told life at the Citadel, the military academy in Charleston, where Conroy went to school. I had no idea it was so horrid. Never thought about it. Both the movie about American militarism and the novel, South of Broad, of particularly Charleston eccentrics, have affirmed what I've heard about Conroy's writing, that he's good at what he does. He tells a good story.  

 

air bellows dirve-thru art museum

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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REMEMBERING MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

acropolis, athens, greece

Back into reading Henry Miller again. Finished the Colossus of Maroussi, which turned out to be one of my top favorite reads and influences on my life. The first hundred pages into The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the book Miller wrote after Colossus. It is his story of returning to USA after living in Paris where he wrote the novels that made his name. A case was made against Tropic of Cancer all the way to the Supremes for bad language, 1961. It was the Warren Court then, an intelligent Supreme Court without so many corporate plants in that time. Miller used the efword and Grove Press was taken to court. It seems strange in this time the Supreme Court can make an intelligent decision. It amounted to the art book of its time. Originally published in Paris in 1934, it was republished in New York and charged with obscenity. Went to the Court in 1961. Immediately, it became the book of the year, Grove Press box sets, paperback edition everywhere. Until the trial, Miller got by on money borrowed from friends, largely. James Joyce's Ulysses, if I recall correctly, needed a Supreme Court trial before it could be published this side of the Atlantic. It became well known as a result, but not so widely read. In Charleston, South Carolina, was a small bookstore across the street from the College of Charleston, The Book Basement, where I worked through my college years. One of the customers before I came to the store, a generation older than me would vacation in Europe and brought back in his luggage half a dozen copies of Ulysses for the bookstore when it did not yet have an American edition. The distinction of a Court case before the Supremes distinguishes Miller with Joyce. Very different writers in about every way the differences can be noted. They both had very large minds.

book cover

Air-Conditioned Nightmare starts in New York upon Miller's return from a year in Greece where he stayed mostly with English writer Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy on the island Corfu. Colossus is written around his trip to Athens and Crete. From New York he teamed up with artist friend Abe Rattner he knew in Paris, and they drove down South through Charleston, then across the deep South to New Orleans, Rattner's destination. Miller drove on to the middle California coast, Big Sur, this the early 1940s, war in Europe, France overtaken, Italy overtaken, and Greece in fear of German invasion. Miller was getting out of Europe with the wolves snapping at his heels. In a three year journey across USA by car, Miller, who left Brooklyn not long out of high school and lived in Paris, wanted to acquaint himself with America. I'd guess after all the years of being "the American," expected to explain and being blamed for American idiocies and to take the praise for American greatness, none of which he had anything to do with. I had a lot of problem with that part of being in another country. I got so sick of "you Americans," I turned mean spirited. In a London pub a man beside me at the bar where I was having a Worthington E, ordered a drink with minute instructions for amount of this and that, temperature. I'd seen that before. Out of curiosity, I asked what it was about. I was thinking, I wouldn't dare expect a waiter or bartender or waitress in America even to listen to a list of instructions that long. In the man's huffy, hear-hear, arrogant way he said it was "for the taste. Why do you Americans drink?" I'd had it up to over my eyebrows hearing you-Americans, like I'm responsible for everybody else, so I said with much inner mirth and a straight face, having fun at the thought of affirming his boring clichés, "To get drunk," like, why else? It's the same with all minorities in America worn out from hearing, "your people." I don't even remember what he looked like, but do remember he turned his back to me and I about busted out laughing. Later, at home a few years, some friends were going to London and asked what it's like. I said you will get an understanding of what it's like to be black in America.

 

henry miller

Miller went to France young, uninterested in living in USA, though when he returned twenty or so years later, America the people, the landscape, held his attention and became the focus of his attention. Reading in Air-Conditioned Nightmare the third time, I'm seeing Miller's influence on my own understanding and interest in the variety of American cultures. Marketing trains us to believe it's one big happy classless society where everybody loves money. Of course, it's not anywhere near that simple, same as your-people is not. I used to think it was obvious and everybody got it because it's right there in our faces. Used to think. In the past. Repeated experience throughout a lifetime has shown me the obvious is a mystery for many more adults than I am comfortable admitting to myself. I have to remind myself we humans are all on different levels of consciousness, all of us mixed together in one boiling, swirling stew. In this time of international wars and population explosion our souls are exploring unfamiliar territory at all times. Perhaps this has something to do with why we cling to the familiar, others of our own race and nationality. I believe, with no backup to support it, there are souls actually born in the wrong place to the wrong people. I'd say this situation would make a very confused individual, or not. One might think the child of a Jew and a Catholic would be confused, but it's not the case. We're so involved in the rapid change of everything around us and inside ourselves we embrace the change in adoration of the New, the latest, such that we've become a culture of the New. I stopped painting when I saw my babies going into the world of see-my-new. It's put on the wall in its place, "see my new...." I have a difficult time letting paintings go. Selling them makes them products. I don't like my babies becoming products, same as I don't like raising calves toward the burger market.

 

book cover

 

I believe I can trace the evolution of my curiosity about the varieties of American people, the different cultures here from region to region, national background, race, level of income, class, to Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare. His book reads as contemporary today as it did in its first year of publication, 1945. He wrote it in my infancy a few hundred miles north of my birthplace. I read it first time in the late 1970s. It was contemporary then. This is evidence of one of my favorite aspects of Miller's writing, the immediacy. He pulls me into his mind and takes me on a mind journey that is here, now. Brings to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, prose poems of invisible cities written in an Italian Surrealist manner by a Marco Polo of the mind. Miller makes you feel where he is in the telling such that I see in my mind's eye where he is, the café, the boat ride to Crete, the streets in Heraklion, the landscape by road across the island to the Minoan ruins. I made the trip seven years after reading Miller's account of his visit in 1939, thereabouts. At the time it seemed like a kind of subconscious pilgrimage to the first known places Greek civilization evolved from, even to the Om point, the omphalos at Delphi, the center of the universe according to early Greek civilization. I did not remember that I was guided to those places by Henry Miller. He too, had taken the road from Athens to Delphi, one of the many beautiful drives on earth. He too, felt the powerful energy of the place. When I felt the energy of the place, and I wasn't even tuned to "energies" then, I understood why the oracle chose Delphi. I reviewed my own tour of Greece in Colossus of Maroussi after forgetting Miller's tour of Greece was the model for my own. I wanted to see the places he wrote about, that I saw in my mind's eye reading his account. I've been looking for something to read that I really want to read, that I want to pick up a second time. I'd pick up something, look at the first few sentences and none of them made me want to finish the page. Didn't know what I was looking for to read. Nothing took hold of me. Then I picked up Colossus. Now I only want to read Miller next, Nightmare. It's an unwitting, subconscious review of Henry Miller's substantial influence on my manner of thinking, the scope of my ethical foundation. I feel awed reading these two books at this time in the life. In a way it's like reading my astrological chart. These two books have influenced me more deeply than I knew or even might have imagined. Another strong influence comes to mind, Leo Tolstoy. Very powerful influence, especially through his biography by Henri Troyat. And Sitting Bull's biography. These are the people I've discovered through reading that my soul connects with, like it connects with Ralph Stanley's and the Carter Family's singing, the voices the soul of these mountains chose to sing through.

omphalos

delphi

 

 

 

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TED STERN FLIES AWAY

     hallelujah bye and bye

Three hours ago the news came to me by email that my friend of 40+ years, Ted Stern, left the body this morning. The email came from Robert Macdonald who is writing his biography. He was hoping Ted would live long enough to see it. He's projecting to be finished with the writing around April. This morning I found an email from Macdonald telling me Ted was not feeling well. I responded by email and then his return email was to tell me Ted had gone on. All morning I'd been thinking about calling Ted. I thought I'd wait until 11:30, before lunch and plenty of time to be alert after getting up. Macdonald's email came through at a quarter to eleven. I set out to send Stern's grandson Eric an email. I'd started to put down his address, had written "eric" and the phone rang. It was Eric to tell me he'd had a call from Uncle Sandy. I sit here looking out the windows at the birds picking up sunflower seeds on the surface of the snow. When I gaze back at the monitor it turns pink and aqua from snow blindness, followed by a moment unable to see at all, then I can see ok. Caterpillar is on her window seat watching the slate-gray snowbirds hopping about and flying against the white background. From time to time she'll squeak and her whiskers will twitch in the Maine Coon way. It excites her so much to watch the birds that it triggers this involuntary twitch of the upper lip.

I find myself reminding self from time to time that this is the day Ted Stern left the body. I've only seen him a few times in the last years. I knew he was in comfortable circumstances at the very expensive assisted-living facility nursing home where they're paid to pay attention to you, not just to clean up after you. He had his own apartment with his own decorations on the walls, furniture from home, and people of his society for neighbors. His peers. He had his books he read during the daytime and football, basketball and baseball to watch in the evenings after the news and a drink. He was a master of self-discipline. It gave the appearance of a neurosis, but I felt like I knew him well enough to see that it was learned. He didn't operate by reaction. Unless somebody really pist him off. It wasn't then that the other would suffer the consequences, but later when it counted. Hitting was not a solution for him. He learned a very great deal of his public service acumen from his cousin in New York, where Ted is from, Robert Moses, the man who could be said to have designed modern Manhattan. I'd met him a few times in his 90s and found most notable Ted's visible respect for him. Ted regarded everyone with respect, so it appeared no more than with anyone else, but his respect for Moses had a golden glow about it. Reverence for the Master. Robert Moses was his teacher, sensei, his spiritual master, guru, cousin and close friend, confident. Moses was the only of Ted's relatives who went to Ted's wedding when he married outside the family religion.

My respect for Ted Stern is that kind of high. He has been my teacher in many ways since we first became acquainted. He was hired to be president at the College of Charleston when I was in my last year. Straight out of the Navy, which I'd been in too and had no love for. I had a hard time respecting a lifer from the military. It was the time of campus activism, not that anything political was going on at College of Charleston. Charleston is not a place for a demonstration. It's like, suppose you gave a demonstration and nobody came. There were half dozen of us that played the anti-war role in our minds. I went to DC in 68 for the march on Washington concerning Vietnam. I'm glad I went, only because it killed my interest in politics except to look at from afar and never commit to. I was a bit insolent after that time. A week or more later my thinking from what I'd seen educated me with new data I needed to know. Stay out of all of it. I hold Johnson down there with Reagan as the very lowest. My regard for Johnson took a nose dive and crashed. Not from what happened at the rally, but from learning afterward the lie he told the press to report in a press conference before the event. The press reported as told, like the good soldiers they're paid well to be, all of them knowing that if they reported what actually happened they'd be shut out of journalism as a career, or any other corporate job. I saw it first reported by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, the only journalist brave enough to tell it. Then it turned up in Norman Mailer's book Armies Of The Night. He was at the press conference too.

I pained under the disillusionment that was also a dissolution, beliefs falling away. I didn't know it then, but learned later that disillusionment equals enlightenment. So enlightenment must be the result of being disillusioned. I can't say that Ted Stern saw through the illusion, because I don't know, but he saw through an awful lot of illusion. He spoke in favor of government decisions at the time, respected Westmoreland, and I took it he bought the package. Did I ever find out different. Some years later I saw him in the hospital after an operation; I don't remember what was removed. He was sailing on some pain medication. He spoke freely and conversationally like he was largely unable to do otherwise. He wasn't much for talking unless it had to do with some sort of action, like relating to a mind full of decisions to make every day. He told me his vision of what he sees civilization coming to in the near future. It was darker than my own. Mine has a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit down to like f22. His tunnel was a long cave. I never heard any of that kind of talk again. In his fully conscious mind he saw the illusion of taking care of business, but also saw we need something to keep us going or we revert to shoot-outs, no law enforcement, heavily armed bandits plundering until the ammunition runs out. His desire to make the world a better place as a result of him having been in it transformed the College of Charleston, a little Southern college going under the third time like somebody drowning, into a nationally respected South Carolina state university inside ten years.

He was instrumental in getting the Spoleto Festival to happen in Charleston. He became a friend and confident to Jean Carlo Menotti, the self-centered composer nearly no one could get along with for any period of time. Arbitration was Stern's talent, his learned talent from Robert Moses and possibly an admiral or two along the way. Menotti needed an arbitrator at his side like he would need a translator if he didn't know English. For Menotti, Ted Stern was his harbor pilot who guided Menotti through the minefield of troubles he created for himself. I think Ted took Menotti for somebody who needed help, the kind of help Ted had to give. The way a big kid will sometimes take care of a little kid. He respected Menotti and liked him. He gave him the Ted Stern treatment that he does for everyone close to him, if they'll allow it. Respect is what the Ted Stern treatment amounts to, an encouraging pat-on-the-back respect. The middle class has lost respect for just about all but money and things associated with money. The Ted Stern kind of respect, respect for your humanity first, stands out. In the mountains he was respected by the people that knew him because he respected them first. Respect is very important in the mountains. He was respected here for his respect.

He has told me his life over the years I've known him. I've also learned in conversations with Robert Macdonald writing the biography that I know very little of his early life. I knew upper West Side New York, Jewish, somewhat privileged, the very definition of Capricorn, Johns Hopkins, Navy 27 years, Charleston. At the same time he transformed the College, he did the same with Charleston, transforming it into the ultimate tourist town that is gracious and beautiful, rewarding to visitors. It's odd how a New York Jew's parachute landed him in the quadrangle of a Southern college going under, a truly Southern place in the latter days of the Old South, and it wasn't very long before he was received like the latest thing from Goodwill Planet. The spirit of friendliness that runs through Charleston now is a part of Ted Stern's making, too. His is the optimistic can-do spirit that supports and encourages. The new Charleston was built in that spirit. There was a time in the early 1970s he told me he was president of 35 civic organizations besides the College. The business community paid close attention to him. He became a friend to the black community because he didn't bullshit them. I suppose he would best be called a visionary in that he visioned the new College of Charleston and the new Charleston into existence, step by step. He has been a loyal and true friend to me all the time I've known him. He was instrumental in getting me to the mountains, my home sweet home, before I knew Air Bellows Mountain was the home of my soul. I know he is being received happily today on the other side of the veil.

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