{"id":48735,"date":"2013-03-20T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=48735"},"modified":"2014-10-31T18:30:55","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T22:30:55","slug":"southern-holiday-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/20\/southern-holiday-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern Holiday, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Pinehurst Hotel, ca. 1940: the possible model for Tennessee Williams\u2019s Hotel Flamingo, where Blanche lived after she lost Belle Reve and before she moved to New Orleans.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mississippi and New Orleans were on my horizon. Light in August <\/i>and Streetcar Named Desire<\/i> were on my mind. That is to say, Gene Smith was back in the mix. The morality and narrative techniques of Faulkner and Williams influenced his photography: he taped the text of Faulkner\u2019s Nobel speech to the wall above his desk in his dilapidated Sixth Avenue loft and considered Williams\u2019s oft-maligned, rarely seen Camino Real <\/i>a pinnacle of American theater. Plus, he once made a portrait of Williams in a pool<\/a>, swimming the backstroke naked with an apparent erection (try that <\/i>aquatic feat, literary lads). The fog of Smith had returned to my Southern holiday road trip.<\/p>\n

After an overnight stop in Mobile, Alabama, my destination was Laurel, Mississippi, south of Jackson and north of New Orleans. Laurel was the fictional hometown of Streetcar<\/i>\u2019s Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella, and the site of their family estate, Belle Reve. It was Blanche\u2019s loss of Belle Reve after the war that sent her to steamy, bedraggled New Orleans to stay with Stella and her ape-husband Stanley Kowalski. The rest is theater history. I wanted to spend some time in Laurel and then follow Blanche\u2019s path into New Orleans. <\/p>\n

The specter of Williams, beyond the nude pool frolic, has woven in and out of my research on Smith over the past few years. In a letter to a friend, Smith once referred to himself as \u201cTennessee O\u2019Neill.\u201d He photographed the 1947 opening of Streetcar <\/i>on Broadway, and he photographed Williams in his New York apartment. Whenever the playwright or his work showed up on radio or TV, Smith rolled his reel-to-reel tape recorder. On one tape, Smith offered an impassioned monologue in favor of Camino Real<\/i>. He also wrote desperate letters to Elia Kazan, director of Streetcar <\/i>and Camino<\/i>, <\/i>semiveiled pleas for help to, he thought, a kindred soul. <\/i><\/p>\n

Two summers ago, in preparation for an event at the Brooklyn Book Festival, a group of actors convened on Bergen Street to read a selection of Smith\u2019s letters. After a particularly dreamy and melodramatic one, an actress exclaimed, \u201cSmith is Blanche DuBois!\u201d That\u2019s perfect, I thought, and of course Blanche is also Tennessee Williams, who had her exclaim, <\/i>\u201cI don\u2019t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don\u2019t tell truths. I tell what ought to be the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blanche\u2019s nemesis was Stanley, the archetypical midcentury bowling-and-poker-night white male, a war veteran, a beer-and-a-shot shift worker who\u2014post-Depression, postwar\u2014suddenly had cultural value as a consumer. The advertisements in Henry Luce\u2019s Life<\/i> magazine were aimed at men like him and their wives, people who found within their reach a higher rung. Thus, Life<\/i> was Gene Smith\u2019s Stanley Kowalski, an inexorable, tormenting mainstream force. For two of his classic photo-essays\u2014\u201cCountry Doctor\u201d (1948) and \u201cNurse Midwife\u201d (1951)\u2014Smith 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.<\/p>\n

Before I left home, the novelist Allan Gurganus had recommended that I take the audio book of Light in August<\/i> on my trip. He went on to compare Blanche DuBois to that novel\u2019s Lena Grove, pregnant and wandering around Mississippi looking for the father of her baby. \u201cFaulkner and Williams both hailed from \u2018nice\u2019 families a few generations down on their luck,\u201d Gurganus told me. \u201cThe drive and ambition they attribute to their very different heroines, in Light in August <\/i>and in Streetcar<\/i>, 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\u2019s search for a father for her child and Blanche\u2019s wish for the security of an oil tycoon who\u2019ll spoil her mirror their creators\u2019 quests. Each made a knight\u2019s gambit, each going in search of acknowledgement, recognition, a place of honor and dignity, a place to stand, in the reconfigured modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n

I cued chapter one of Light in August <\/i>on the Impala\u2019s stereo when I entered Mississippi. For the next twelve days of driving, Faulkner\u2019s words, read by veteran actor Will Patton, intoxicated me. I found myself longing for the next back road where I could let the words saturate me. A couple of times I picked up a twenty-four-ounce Miller High Life missile, drove to a remote site, parked, shut off the engine, and just listened to Patton read Faulkner.<\/p>\n

\"Off<\/a>

Off Highway 1, near Rosedale, Mississippi.<\/p><\/div>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

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 eighteen thousand after being twenty-five thousand in 1970.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t shake them off. Constantly checking the rear-view mirror, irritated, I would pull over to let one monster truck pass only to find another one immediately sniffing my tail. In three weeks of driving around the South I had this experience only in Laurel and its environs. I didn\u2019t feel this menace while walking around, only on the road.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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 high speed Wi-Fi.<\/p>\n

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 west of Laurel, to look for a relative\u2019s grave. Earl blinked and his face pruned with concern. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be caught there after dark with those plates on your car,\u201d he told me. My rented Impala had Maryland plates. \u201cThat place\u2014Sullivan\u2019s Hollow [\u201choller,\u201d Earl pronounced it]\u2014is not known to be friendly to outsiders.\u201d He paused then added, \u201cOh, well, you\u2019ll be fine. It\u2019s not as bad as it used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

On May 8, 1960, Gene Smith taped a radio conversation between Yukio Mishima and Tennessee Williams during which the two writers favorably compared Japan and the American South, noting, in both, the unique blend of qualities \u201cbrutal\u201d and \u201celegant.\u201d Williams said, \u201cA kind of beauty and grace. So that although it is horror, it is not just sheer horror, it has also the mystery of life, which is an elegant thing.\u201d Mishima said, \u201cIt\u2019s a very strange mixture.\u201d In the United States, it\u2019s a mixture that helped produce blues and jazz and Southern literature.<\/p>\n

Transfixed by Will Patton\u2019s performance of Light in August<\/i>, I began the process of tracking him down. By the time he called me from his apartment near Union Square, I was toward the end of my Southern sojourn. I\u2019d spent a week in New Orleans, several days in Shreveport and the Mississippi Delta, on to Oxford and then Athens, Georgia, with an O\u2019Connor pilgrimage to Milledgeville. I was on my way back home to North Carolina, still listening to Light in August. <\/i><\/p>\n

Patton was born in South Carolina and today he divides his time between Manhattan and the North Carolina mountains and South Carolina coast. He has a naturally subtle and pliable Southern accent, perfect for the varying voices and multiplying narratives of Light in August. <\/i>He\u2019s not just performing the role of narrator, or characters Joe Christmas or Lena Grove; he performs the whole complexity of Faulkner, with a hypnotic pacing of blues.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew it would be demanding, quite a challenge,\u201d said Patton of recording the book. \u201cOne of the gifts my father, a former minister, gave me was a love for Faulkner. Go Down, Moses <\/i>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 <\/i>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\u2019s a very intense experience. You live the book. It\u2019s a great privilege to be inside a work of art like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listening to Patton talk about inhabiting Faulkner, I was left feeling that Gene Smith may have been happier working in a different medium than photography. He would have liked an artist like Patton absorbing his work, living inside of it, and rendering it. He longed for that kind of engagement. He couldn\u2019t stand art exhibitions with \u201cneat little frames\u201d (his words). The pristine distance left him frustrated. In magazines, his work competed with full-page ads for vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. He tried to overcome that distance with extreme efforts in the darkroom and with visual narratives that he said were influenced by the likes of Williams, Faulkner, and Beethoven. He tried to extend his fever as far as he could, but in the end his art was an object to be gazed at, not words or notes to be performed and <\/i>gazed at. Maybe he should have been Chaplin or Orson Welles, two more of his favorite artists (whom he also photographed). Then he could have had it all.<\/p>\n

Read part 1 here<\/a> and part 2 here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sam Stephenson is Lehman Brady Joint Visiting Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. He is currently finishing a biography of W. Eugene Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/em><\/p>\n

Photograph by Courtney Fitzpatrick<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mississippi and New Orleans were on my horizon. Light in August and Streetcar Named Desire were on my mind. That is to say, Gene Smith was back in the mix. The morality and narrative techniques of Faulkner and Williams influenced his photography: he taped the text of Faulkner\u2019s Nobel speech to the wall above his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1667],"tags":[10411,10410,4619,3393,10409,10408,1550,10412,3581,1753],"class_list":["post-48735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-from-a-biographer","tag-allan-gurganus","tag-elia-kazan","tag-eugene-oneill","tag-light-in-august","tag-streetcar-named-desire","tag-tennesse-williams","tag-w-eugene-smith","tag-will-patton","tag-william-faulkner","tag-yukio-mishima"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Fictional Hometown of Blanche DuBois<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Part three of Sam Stephenson\u2019s journey south to research the photographer W. 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