William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

The first two programmes dealt with the initial days of the crisis and the dispatch of the fleet and here, it seemed to me, was another manifest lapse. The fact that there was a deal of jubilant unreflecting patriotism in the air at the time was incontrovertible and was clearly established by the pictures. But the narration failed to comment on the illusory nature of this elation or display any of the sobering but necessary ironies with which hindsight has now provided us. The most remarkable phenomenon of the early days of the crisis was exactly this dangerous self-delusion about the nature of war that appeared to have almost the entire country in its chilling grip. The prime function of any programme dealing with those heady days in April should be first to point out and highlight the cruel absurdities of the “Stick it up your junta” spirit and then do its utmost to eradicate any residual traces. There is no sign of that happening at the moment in Task Force South.

1982

This is a catch-all title to enable me to include articles I’ve written that often have a bearing — sometimes remote — on books I have published or the release of films I have written. Both my essays on the British “Caff” and minicabs, for example, were designed to promote, first, my novel Armadillo and then the broadcast of my three-part adaptation of it on the BBC. More and more the publication of a book seems to involve the author in all manner of ancillary journalism. The advantage of this, however, is that the article can be more uncompromising, and to the point: the necessary finesse involved in slipping hard facts into a work of fiction is not required. In this kind of journalism polemic overrules disinterestedness: a case has to be made as entertainingly as possible and sometimes that motive is exhilarating .

It turned out to be a 150-mile detour. Shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon I saw the first sign. “Welcome to Tallapoosa.” It had an unreal familiarity: Tallapoosa revisited, almost. Then there was another sign. “Lions Club of Tallapoosa welcomes you. Meets every Thursday at Tally Mt. Country Club.” And then, a little way up the road, “Tallapoosa city limit. Welcome. City of Tallapoosa. Please obey all ordinances. Population 2,869. Drive carefully.” The familiarity, I realized, was a poetic one: “Stars at Tallapoosa” by Wallace Stevens:

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.

The night is not the cradle that they cry,

The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.

The lines are much too dark and much too sharp .

The mind herein attains simplicity.

There is no moon, on single, silvered leaf.

The body is no body to be seen

But is an eye that studies its black lid .

“Stars at Tallapoosa” was published in Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poems, Harmonium , in 1923. It’s a perfect example of how he manages to be at once opaque and entrancing. I had read the poem many times and for some reason, when I knew I was going to the South, I looked up Tallapoosa on my Rand McNally road atlas and was disappointed to discover that it was on the Alabama-Georgia border, some considerable distance away from the rough circle of contacts that was going to take me from Atlanta to Augusta, to Charleston, South Carolina, Beaufort, Savannah and back to Atlanta again. My disappointment was mitigated by the consideration that, if I didn’t ever get to Tallapoosa, then at least it could be preserved intact in my imagination; that the Tallapoosa Stevens’s poem had conjured up for me — the quintessential hick town, but also somehow magic and potent — would never be undermined by reality.

To drive from Savannah to Atlanta you take Interstate 16. It speeds you directly through the rather monotonous countryside that prevails in this corner of Georgia, monotonous because all the trees seem to be of one type — a rather tough-looking average-sized pine. The only relief from this homogeneous landscape comes with each junction or intersection. Here there are gathered the fast-food franchises, the twenty-four-hour supermarkets, the motels, the gas stations. Steak ‘n’ Ale, Starvin’ Marvin, Econo-Lodge, Scottish Inns (the cheapest), Bi-Lo, Wife-Saver, Wife’s Nite Off. These huge plastic signs tower high over the countryside, a hundred feet tall, like giant cocktail-stirrers stuck in the earth.

In the big car, a chill cell thanks to the air-conditioning, there’s nothing to do apart from listen to the radio. Every town has its radio station. You pass them from time to time, a concrete blockhouse below a teetering aerial. I search the wavebands, trying to escape the plangent moralizing of country and western music, but in vain. If the station isn’t broadcasting keening guitars and sobbing voices telling of adultery, divorce, alcoholism, mental and physical cruelty, then it’s pumping out religious homilies, sermons and hymns interspersed with advertisements for waterproof Bibles “for poolside reading” or the Bible on tape “while you’re travelling, working or relaxing at home.”

Macon, Georgia, marks the halfway stage. After the pine forest I was looking forward to Macon — reputedly a grim, featureless industrial town — but Interstate 16 whisked me around it promptly. I was due in Atlanta that evening but had wildly overestimated how long it would take me to get there. By late morning I found I’d covered most of the ground and needed to kill some time. I turned off the highway and drove to a small town called Jackson.

Jackson was nondescript, a typical long, thin town that straggled along the road for a mile or so. A red sandstone courthouse stood in the middle. A notice warned that “anyone using this building as a comfort station will be prosecuted.” Outside was a cement statue of a soldier. “Our Confederate Heroes,” it said on the plinth.

I went into a cafe, ordered a coke and a doughnut and wondered what to do for the rest of the day. I was meandering through the South — Georgia and South Carolina — looking for hick towns, one-horse towns off the beaten track with no touristic allure. I had seen dozens — Smyrna, Bamberg, Denmark, Crawfordville, Madison, Smokes, Apalachee, Walnut Grove, Tyrone. I stopped long enough to mooch around, take some photographs or have a bite to eat. Some were beautiful places, the azaleas blooming fiercely outside immaculate ante-bellum frame-houses, the lawns in front of the courthouse and post office cropped like cricket squares, the shops in the malls bright and fresh with new paint. Others were mean and forgotten, consigned to a slow decay and oblivion now that the network of interstate highways so efficiently linked the main centres of population.

In many ways the rural South fulfilled all my expectations. People were poor, attitudes were confined or frozen, and yet I’ve never encountered such candid friendliness. The first old woman I talked to said “Ah do declare,” and the Civil War lived on in people’s memories as if it had happened only a decade before. But the towns had disappointed me. They were either too frothily perfect — porches, rocking-chairs, coruscating flowers — or drab and banal, lacking any frisson or atmosphere. One caught it occasionally — a group of old black men sitting motionless outside a store in Madison, a shop in Beaufort with a display of trophies from the Little Miss Teenage South Carolina pageant — but it was fleeting or too localized. I wanted something more. I wanted to go to Tallapoosa.

I took out my map and spread it on the table. I was a somewhat alien presence in the cafe, filled now with Jackson ladies who had interrupted their shopping for a chat. I told myself, not tempting fate, that Tallapoosa would now surely be a smug dormitory for Birmingham or Montgomery, or else have been transformed from what it was in Stevens’s day by the erection of some steel mill or sprawling chemical plant, but the urge to see it for myself was too strong to resist. I left Jackson, with its “comfort station” ban and chattering ladies, with a feeling of elation.