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I went into the tourist information office to get directions to Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. Faulkner lived in Oxford for the whole of his life, and his home is now a museum, preserved as it was on the day he died in 1962.
I was distressed to see that Playboy is now printed on that awful glossy paper that makes the pages stick together like wet paper towels.
Uh
Once in a while we would swap our dads’ magazines among ourselves and then imagine their perplexity when they went to the closet and found that instead of last month’s issue of Gent they now possessed a two-year-old copy of Nugget and, as a bonus, a paperback book called Ranchhouse Lust.
Looking back now, I can hardly believe it because really—let’s be frank—Hugh Hefner has always been kind of an asshole. I mean honestly, if you had all that money, would you want a huge circular bed and to spend your life in a silk dressing gown and carpet slippers? Would you want to fill a wing of your house with the sort of girls who would be happy to engage in pillow fights in the nude and wouldn’t mind you taking pictures of them while so occupied for publication in a national magazine? Would you want to come downstairs of an evening and find Buddy Hackett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey
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It was a shock to realize that both Playboy and I were a lot older than I had thought and that we had nothing in common anymore. Sadly I returned the Playboy to the rack and realized it would be a long time—well, thirty days anyway—before I picked up another one.
It so happened that twenty-five years ago to the very week there had been a riot on this campus when a young black named James Meredith, escorted by 500 federal marshals, enrolled as a student at Ole Miss. The people of Oxford were so inflamed at the thought of having to share their campus with a Niggra boy that they wounded thirty of the marshals and killed two journalists.
Could that kind of hate have been extinguished in just one generation? It hardly seemed possible.
HA HA NOPE I mean fuck man Reagan barfed up coded racist bullshit in Neshoba County.
Come to that, it was impossible to imagine such a well-scrubbed, straight-arrow group of young people rioting over anything—except
Wait thirty years
It struck me as notably ironic that Southerners could despise blacks so bitterly and yet live comfortably alongside them, while in the North people by and large did not mind blacks, even respected them as humans and wished them every success, just so long as they didn’t have to mingle with them too freely.
Yeah why would that be
The Elvis Presley house is in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, just off the Elvis Presley Memorial Highway.
It isn’t just the indistinctness with which Southerners speak that makes it so difficult to follow, it’s also the slowness. This begins to get to you after a while. The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness.
here now there were hardly any hillbilly-sounding people. In fact, there were hardly any Southern accents at all. All the disc jockeys sounded as if they came from Ohio.
Southerners had become so sensitive about their reputation for being shit-squishing rednecks that all the presenters on TV and radio tried to sound as if they came from the North and had never in their whole lives nibbled a hush puppy or sniffed a grit.
Not having running water in the house is something beyond the realms of the imaginable to most Americans.
I had never felt so self-conscious, so visible. I suddenly appreciated what a black person must feel like in North Dakota.
One of the first sights I saw was a blonde sweeping past in a replica Duesenberg that must have cost her daddy $25,000. It was obviously a high-school graduation present. If I could have run fast enough to keep up, I would happily have urinated all down the side of it. Coming so soon after the poverty of Tuskegee, it made me feel strangely ashamed.
I would scarcely have believed all this myself except that the summer before I had taken two American high-school girls for a drive around Dorset—bright girls, both of them now enrolled in colleges of high repute—and neither of them had ever heard of Thomas Hardy. How can you live to be eighteen years old and never have at least heard of Thomas Hardy?
Says the guy who just admitted he never read Faulkner
Incidentally, I’ll tell you why they do so poorly. They answer the questions as fast as they can, at random, and then sleep. We used to do it all the time. Once a year in high school, our principal, Mr. Toerag, would file the whole school into the auditorium and make us spend a tedious day answering multiple-choice questions on a variety of subjects for some national examination.
The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist.
The path was lined with large rocks from each state. Every governor had evidently been asked to contribute some hunk of native stone and here they were, lined up like a guard of honor. It’s not often you see an idea that stupid brought to fruition.
Iowa’s contribution was, as expected, carefully middling. The stone had been cut to the shape of the state, but by someone who had clearly never attempted such a thing before. I imagine he had impulsively put in the lowest bid and was surprised to get the contract.
I was particularly taken with a room full of all the handmade gifts that had been given to him when he was president and then presumably stuck at the back of a very large cupboard. There were carved walking sticks by the dozen and maps of America made of inlaid wood and portraits of FDR scratched on walrus tusks and etched with acid into slate.
What it didn’t tell you was that what he really came here for was a bit of rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living room and his was on the other.
It is only when you stumble out of this urban rain forest, out into the open streets of the modern city, exposed to the glare of the boiling sun, that you realize just how sweltering the South can be. This was October, a time of flannel shirts and hot toddies in Iowa, but here summer was unrelenting.
Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown.
There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theaters without balconies? To me going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen.
How appealing
One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county.
South Carolina was boring. For the sake of haste I got on Interstate 26, which runs in a 200-mile diagonal across the state, through a monotonous landscape of dormant tobacco fields and salmon-colored soil.
Yuuuuup
I particularly fancied having the Bryson City Church of Christ sign beside my front gate in England and being able to put up different messages every week like REPENT NOW, LIMEYS.
I remembered reading some weeks before that it is still against the law in twenty US states, most of them in the Deep South, for heterosexuals to engage in oral or anal intercourse. I had nothing like that in mind just now, you understand, but I think it indicates that some of these places can be doggedly unenlightened in matters pertaining to sex and could well have ordinances with respect to the unlawful handling of panty shields.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers 500,000 acres in North Carolina and Tennessee. I didn’t realize it before I went there, but it is the most popular national park in America, attracting nine million visitors a year, three times as many as any other national park, and even early on a Sunday morning in October it was crowded.
People don’t live in national parks in America as they do in England. They are areas of wilderness—often of enforced wilderness. The Smoky Mountains were once full of hillbillies who lived in cabins up in the remote hollows, up among the clouds, but they were moved out and now the park is sterile as far as human activities go.
The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste.
Yup that's Gatlinburg
Carbo’s Police Museum (“See ‘Walking Tall’ Sheriff Buford Pusser’s Death Car!”),
OK that is kinda cool
I loved it. When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an hour in such a place. He had just two criteria for gauging the worth of a holiday attraction: Was it educational and was it free?
My dad was the most honest man I ever met, but vacations blinded him to his principles. When I had pimples scattered across my face and stubble on my chin he was still swearing at ticket booths that I was eight years old.
fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beards.
The valley people—who are themselves generally poor and backward—regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely scattered intervals to buy provisions.
In America, to be white and impoverished really takes some doing. Of course, this was American poverty, this was white people’s poverty, which isn’t like poverty elsewhere. It isn’t even like the poverty in Tuskegee. It has been suggested with more than a touch of cynicism that when Lyndon Johnson launched his great War on Poverty in 1964, the focus was placed on Appalachia not because it was so destitute but because it was so white.
In 1964, my future father-in-law in England was, like most people there, years away from owning his first car and even now he has never owned a new one, yet no one ever called him destitute or sent him a free sack of flour and some knitting wool at Christmas.
There are thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a fact because my father stopped at every one of them.
Unless, like me, you pulled out of the river of people, you found yourself standing at the ticket counter making an instant decision on which of three kinds of tickets to buy—a Patriot’s Pass for $24.50, a Royal Governor’s Pass for $20 or a Basic Admission Ticket for $15.50, each allowing entrance to a different number of restored buildings. Most visitors found themselves parted from a lot of money and standing in the line to the processing doorway before they knew what had hit them.
There was something wrong with the whole setup, something deeply fishy about the way it worked. I had lived in America long enough to know that if the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket there would be an enormous sign on the wall saying, You MUST HAVE A TICKET. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT TRYING TO GET IN WITHOUT ONE.
They had had a ride of roughly 200 yards and were about to discover that what their tickets entitled them to do was join long, ill-humored lines of other ticketholders standing outside each restored historic building, sweating in silence and shuffling forward at a rate of one step every three minutes. I don’t think I had ever seen quite so many people failing to enjoy themselves.
It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over.
Wanna bet
It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.
Cringe
A lot of Williamsburg isn’t as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of Colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration—$90 million so far.
Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly.
Yeah like he can talk
But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn’t measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall. My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn’t think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn’t supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn’t know and told me I should go to
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In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsonian’s acquisitions included ten thousand moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter.
