The following essay by David Gessner is published in Volume 25.1, the 25th anniversary issue of The Southeast Review, which you can purchase here. Also, included in this issue of The Online Companion to The Southeast Review is a video of Gessner explaining why he goes skiing on the beach in North Carolina. You can listen to Gessner and watch him ski here.
Exiles
I have recently undergone a sea change, though I still live
by the same sea. Not long ago I left my home beach on Cape Cod
and moved a thousand miles south to an overdeveloped island
off the Carolina coast. It was a hard goodbye, one necessitated
by money, work, and health insurance, paralleling a career move
my father made, from Massachusetts to North Carolina, at exactly
the same age. Though in moments of melodrama I feel I have made
myself into an exile, I know it isn't all that bad. But at the
very least there is something in the way of surrender to the
move. I am a nature writer and it was by writing well about
how much I loved my former home that I got the job that led
me away. Now I have given up not just a place, but the idea
that I will forever commit to one place on earth.
This, as I say, is overly-dramatic, but I can’t seem to
shake thoughts of displacement. This morning on the beach I
heard a loon cry, and though my field guide tells me that those
birds winter as far south as Florida, the eerie yodeling sounded
out of place, a melancholy song of the north. I watched the
pelicans dive for a while, twisting down into the water, following
their divining rod bills, and thought about how exotic they
would look plunging into Cape Cod Bay (though the rumor is they
have now made it as far north as Long Island). Then I headed
back home and made some coffee and got to work on my novel,
a book set in the North that I am now writing in the South.
I had trouble dredging up the specifics of my old home, despite
combing the dozen or so journals on the bookshelf next to my
desk, and so, procrastinating, I checked my e-mail. What I found
on-line was not so different than what I'd found on the beach:
It was clearly going to be one of those days full of coincidence,
the kind you're not allowed to have in fiction but that happen
often enough in life, when many of your worlds—in this
case electronic, avian, and emotional—insist on playing
the same theme. There was an e-mail from an old friend, Brad
Watson, who had written a beautiful Southern novel while living
in the North. The e-mail was an exciting one: He had quit his
teaching job and moved to a cabin in Foley near the Gulf in
Southern Alabama to be close to his son, Owen. He wrote:
I am now officially a hermit, and man you’re right, it
feels good, feels right. The beard’s back after an eight
month absence, hair sticking up all around the bald spot like
wild grass on the rim of a blighted field. This old house smells
like woodsmoke. The other night, Owen said, “The smell
of this house reminds me of the smell of a house on Cape Cod,”
and he was talking about the old Gessner house. So I suppose
right now I’m the southern version of you in those days.
In another parallel, it had been Brad’s
first book of Southern short stories that had led him north,
when he was offered a five year position as a Briggs-Copeland
lecturer at Harvard. Brad liked to play up the Beverly Hillbillies
aspect of this move, the country bumpkin strolling into Harvard
Yard with a piece of straw between his teeth. Of course he
was anything but a rube, and became one of the school’s
most popular teachers, though he did make one bumpkin-like
decision in choosing to live, not in the urban mix of Cambridge,
but down near me in the off-season wilds of Cape Cod. We were
introduced by a mutual friend, a Southern writer in fact,
and met at a drunken dinner at Brad’s house with our
wives where he served coq au vin, a slow-cooked brothy chicken
that you could gum off the bone. We drank too much—this
would become a repeated theme—and at one point he admitted
he had a 26 year old son from his first marriage. I did a
little math and figured that meant he’d had his son
when he was 16. “You really are a Southerner,”
I blurted. When he laughed instead of scolding me for my stereotyping—a
scolding that might have actually happened with other oversensitive
Southern writers of my acquaintance—I knew it was the
beginning of a beautiful friendship.
At the time we were living a half hour away in East Dennis
on the Bay side of Cape Cod—again playing north to his
south—but the next year Brad and his family rented a
house less than mile away from us, right on the beach. It
was a spectacular house where you could lie in bed and stare
out at the rocks and the ocean and every now and then see
a breaching whale, and where, on the rocky beach below, you
could find stranded loggerhead or Kemp’s ridley turtles
and the cadavers of coyotes and watch winter shorebirds like
dovekies and gannets. The bluff, which you could see out of
the western windows of the house, was where I would eventually
set my Cape Cod novel, and the wind would be more than a minor
character in that novel, since it never stopped whipping across
the Bay and hitting the side of the house with enough force
to make it hard to open the door in winter. The wind drove
Brad’s wife crazy and made her miss the South, but it
also leant a drama to the place that verged on melodrama,
as if they were living inside the pages of Wuthering Heights.
It’s hard not to romanticize the year we lived down
the street from each other, and I need to remind myself that
there were problems for all of us—career-related, familial,
marital, even chemical—that made the year less than
romantic. But I still can’t help but look back somewhat
hazily on that time: I had spent my twenties writing in isolation
with no literary community at all, and now, suddenly, I was
part of a tiny writing community, a Bloomsbury on the beach
that included us and our wives. Brad and I would go for runs
around the cranberry bog and bat back and forth the various
plots of the various books that were obsessing us, and often
I would find that he understood the literary allusion I was
making or that I understood his, or that we had read the same
book, or would soon read that book on the other’s suggestion,
and before I knew it we were having, between heavy breaths
and plodding steps, a real-live, bona fide literary discussion.
One thing I loved about those runs is the way our talk ranged
from the high to the low. Low crude jokes, occasional high
insight. And plenty of shoptalk too: books, sure, but also
ways to get ourselves started, that is to make sure we sat
ourselves down and got to the business of typing each day.
There is no Algonquin Round Table without booze, and drinking
was also part of the year’s ritual. (I later suggested
that Brad’s biography should be called The Sodden
Heart.) As it happened there was already a great tradition
of cocktail hour on that part of Cape Cod. Not much more than
a mile way from where we lived the great New England nature
writer John Hay had shared drinks with the displaced Southern
poet Conrad Aiken in the 50s, back when Aiken was collecting
the second of his Pulitzer Prizes and when his reputation
was still considered on par with T. S. Eliot. No living writer—not
Bernard DeVoto with his evocation of the perfect martini or
the liquor-soaked Hemingway or even Aiken’s protégé
Malcolm Lowry—could match Conrad when it came to the
daily glorification of booze. “The ritual of cocktail
hour represents the communion of all friendly minds separated
in time and space,” wrote Aiken. His poetic elevation
of alcohol grew so famous that even the napkins used for the
Aiken’s pewter drinking goblets later found their way
into an Updike novel.
Our nightly boozing wasn’t quite so glamorous. Brad
would sip whisky, slouched in his chair and I would swill
many beers, and my wife Nina and Brad’s wife would drink
wine. If this wasn’t the stuff of literary legend, it
worked okay for me. There I was, living on my favorite place
on earth, the closest thing I had and would ever have to a
Walden, and now I also had a new and dear—and bookish!—friend
right down the road, someone who also understood the daily
wrestling match with words, and also understood the constant
career disappointments—the envy and bitterness and failure,
the way the game was so obviously rigged—and who I could
drink and laugh about all of it with.
Of course nothing this simple exists for long, if it ever
did exist at all outside of stray and random moments. It’s
easy enough to make a golden age once the sloppiness of the
actual time has passed. By the next year Brad had finally
moved up to Cambridge and our friendship had already begun
to slip a notch. Brad’s time at Harvard was too complicated
to call a triumph, but there were moments of triumph. One
was when he imported two of his favorite Southern writers,
Barry Hannah and Padget Powell, to speak to a packed house
in the Thompson Room below a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.
Hannah, who was very sick at the time, teared up at the podium,
saying that he felt “like Quentin Compson come to Harvard,”
and that now he knew “this Southern boy has made good.”
A year later Brad’s stint in Cambridge ended and he
headed back to the South to teach. Since then I have seen
him only occasionally and for very short periods of time.
In the meantime Brad had gone a good while between books,
not out of any traditional version of writer’s block—that
is out of paucity—but rather out of excess, many different
plots competing for prominence in his mind. He finally bore
down, and finished his novel, The Heaven of Mercury, during
his last two years in Cambridge. Of course, strategically
speaking, I’ve gone about this essay all wrong, and
by so excessively romanticizing my early friendship with Brad
you will never believe me when I tell you that the book he
produced during those years on the Cape and in Cambridge is
one of our greatest contemporary novels. It will sound like
hokum, like nonsense, or, even worse, like that lowest and
most deceitful of things: a blurb.
But it’s true. Writers tend to be friends with other
writers—it just eventually ends up working out that
way—but it doesn’t always happen that your favorite
books come from your favorite people. I’ve read a lot
of friends’ work that I’ve had to politely praise,
but Brad’s book was an exception. I had heard him talk
about it often enough on those runs around the bog, but even
bad writers can sometimes talk beautifully about their work
in abstract. But the thing itself, the final book, was, and
remains, a delight. The book’s main character, Finus,
is a man of deep wistfulness and melancholy, a man who admits
his own “inability to see the world except through the
crinolated filters of self-conscious need.” But within
the book’s pages Brad himself, as if fulfilling Finus’s
wish to “not be who he was” flies from character
to character, inhabiting each deeply, from Finus himself to
Finus’s unrequited love, Birdie Wells, to Birdie’s
black maid, Creasie, until we experience a full and varied,
and yes, slightly sodden, world. There is an element of caricature—like
Finus’s mother a “poor God-ravaged grackle of
a woman,” or the horse named Dan: “A long, slow
fart flabbered from the proud black lips of Dan’s hole...,”
or Mrs. Urquhart’s heart, like a “shriveled potato”—and
an element of the grotesque, like the scenes of necrophilia
or the final mystery of an actual shriveled heart. But this
is a humanized grotesquerie. Critics drew comparisons to the
usual Southern suspects, Faulkner and O’Conner and Welty,
as well as throwing the name Marquez around, due to the magical
scenes at the end. But I was reminded of the early Cormac
McCarthy, not the cowboy stuff, but the books Brad had turned
me onto, the McCarthy of Child of God and, less so,
of Suttree. The difference, to my mind, was that
Brad’s stuff was better: It scumbled the surface of
language and surprised in a similar fashion, but as well as
being a pleasure on a language level, it told a story about
very human characters, something McCarthy, for all his achievement
and renown, does not do.
Happily, Brad’s accomplishment did not go unrecognized.
Heaven was a great critical success, with the exception of
one vastly overrated New York paper (that tends not to review
good books anyway), and was a finalist for the National Book
Award. For my money, it should have won.
I was quite proud to be mentioned on the acknowledgements
page, with a phrase that might have easily come from one of
our runs. Brad’s nod to me was a simple and practical
one: “Thanks to David Gessner for urging me to get on
with it.” And so Brad is a role model as I sit here
at my Southern desk staring at my newly-purchased Southern
Computer in my Southern Town and trying to resuscitate these
dead journal details and to create or re-create my days on
Cape Cod. I want to write of my fictional Cape Cod in a gritty
and particular way and I can think of no better models than
the quirky Southern novels I admire, Brad’s not the
least among them. Of course there is a tradition of writing
about places after you have left them, a tradition every bit
as strong as that of writing while in a place. It’s
just that I’ve never been of the Hemingway school, the
exile school, evoking childhood Michigan from Paris, but of
the Thoreauvian one, writing of a place while still in the
infatuated midst of it. So some adjustment will be necessary.
But here I am, after all, and I won’t be going back
any time soon, so I might as well make something of my exile.
The truth is that the more I work, the more I see the advantages
of holding a place at arm’s length. For one thing, now
that it is in the past tense, I can see the time we were on
Cape Cod as a kind of story with a beginning and end, an epoch
in our lives, and can make sense of it in a way I never could
while in its midst. And mine isn’t really much of an
exile: We will be going back North in the summers, after all,
and I can imagine a benefit to this pulsing, to going away
and coming back, to seeing a place from afar, and so seeing
it new. And this annual cycle will include the re-infatuation
of seasonal return: my own return right after the bank swallows
come back, then the white clouds of beach plum blossoms in
later May, the prairie warbler with its xylophone song, the
fox kits scampering up the jetty rocks to their den. In fact,
thinking about these things leaves me ready to chuck this
essay, and get down to my real business, that of imagining
Cape Cod. Enough throat clearing. Exile is just another excuse
for halting at the imaginative threshold, the sort of excuse
we are always using to stop ourselves short. As Samuel Johnson
said, any man can write anywhere and any time, as long as
he “sets himself doggedly to it.” Or, as Brad
might advise me: It’s time to get on with it.
