Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  “Mister Lytle, what did you say?”

  “I told the truth,” he said passionately. “I recognized the moment, that’s what I did.” But in the defensive thrust of his jaw there quivered something like embarrassment.

  He mentions this land dispute in his “family memoir,” A Wake for the Living, his most readable and in many ways his best book. That’s perhaps an idiosyncratic opinion. There are people who’ve read a lot more than I have who consider his novels lost classics. But it may be precisely because of the Faustian ego that thundered above his sense of himself as a novelist that he carried a lighter burden into the memoir, and this freedom thawed in his style some of the vivacity and spontaneity that otherwise you find only in the letters. There’s a scene in which he describes the morning his grandmother was shot in the throat by a Union soldier in 1863. “Nobody ever knew who he was or why he did it,” Lytle writes, “he mounted a horse and galloped out of town.” To the end of her long life this woman wore a velvet ribbon at her neck, fastened with a golden pin. That’s how close Lytle was to the Civil War. Close enough to reach up as a child, passing into sleep, and fondle the clasp of that pin. The eighteenth century was just another generation back from there, and so on, hand to hand. This happens, I suppose, this collapsing of time, when you make it as far as your nineties. When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.

  The incident with his grandmother is masterfully handled:

  She ran to her nurse. The bullet had barely missed the jugular vein. Blood darkened the apple she still held in her hand, and blood was in her shoe. The enemy in the street now invaded the privacy of the house. The curious entered and stared. They confiscated the air … To the child’s fevered gaze the long bayonets of the soldiers seemed to reach the ceiling, as they filed past her bed, staring out of boredom and curiosity.

  Miss Polly passed us again. Apparently she’d changed her mind about the butter. We made a U-turn and trailed her to the cabin. Back inside they embraced. She buried her face in his coat, laughing and weeping. “Oh, sister,” he said, “I’m such an old fool, goddamn it.”

  I’ve wished at times that we had endured some meaningful falling out. In truth he began to exasperate me in countless petty ways. He needed too much, feeding and washing and shaving and dressing, more than he could admit to and keep his pride. Anyone could sympathize, but I hadn’t signed on to be his butler. One day I ran into the white-haired professor, who shared with me that Lytle had been complaining about my cooking.

  Mainly, though, I’d fallen in love with a tall, nineteen-year-old half-Cuban girl from North Carolina, with freckles on her face and straight dark hair down her back. She was a class behind mine, or what would have been mine, at the school, and she liked books. On our second date she gave me her father’s roughed-up copy of Hunger, the Knut Hamsun novel. I started to spend more time downstairs. Lytle became pitifully upset. When I invited her in to meet him, he treated her coldly, made some vaguely insulting remark about “Latins,” and at one point asked her if she understood a woman’s role in an artist’s life.

  There came a wickedly cold night in deep winter when she and I lay asleep downstairs, wrapped up under a pile of old comforters on twin beds we’d pushed together. By now the whole triangle had grown so unpleasant that Lytle would start drinking earlier than usual on days when he spotted her car out back, and she no longer found him amusing or, for that matter, I suppose, harmless. My position was hideous.

  She shook me awake and said, “He’s trying to talk to you on the thing.” We had this antiquated monitor system, the kind where you depress the big silver button to talk and let it off to hear. The man hadn’t mastered an electrical device in his life. At breakfast one morning, when I’d made the mistake of leaving my computer upstairs after an all-nighter, he screamed at me for “bringing the enemy into this home, into a place of work.” Yet he’d become a bona fide technician on the monitor system.

  “He’s calling you,” she said. I lay still and listened. There was a crackling.

  “Beloved,” he said, “I hate to disturb you, in your slumbers, my lord. But I believe I might freeze to DEATH up here.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “If you could just … lie beside me.”

  I looked at her. “What do I do?”

  She turned away. “I wish you wouldn’t go up there.”

  “What if he dies?”

  “You think he might?”

  “I don’t know. He’s ninety-two, and he says he’s freezing to death.”

  “Beloved…?” She sighed. “You should probably go up there.”

  He didn’t speak as I slipped into bed. He fell back asleep instantly. The sheets were heavy white linen and expensive. It seemed there were shadowy acres of snowy terrain between his limbs and mine. I floated off.

  When I woke at dawn he was nibbling my ear and his right hand was on my genitals.

  I sprang out of bed and began to hop around the room like I’d burned my finger, sputtering foul language. Lytle was already moaning in shame, fallen back in bed with his hand across his face like he’d just washed up somewhere, a piece of wrack. I should mention that he wore, as on every chill morning, a Wee Willie Winkie nightshirt and cap. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ, Mister Lytle.”

  “Oh, beloved…”

  His having these desires was not an issue—no one could be so naive. His tastes were more or less an open secret. I don’t know if he was gay or bisexual or pansexual or what. Those distinctions are clumsy terms with which to address the mysteries of sexuality. But on a few occasions he’d spoken about his wife in a manner that to me was movingly erotic, nothing like any self-identifying gay man I’ve ever heard talk about women and sex. Certainly Lytle had loved her, because it was clear how he missed her, Edna, his beautiful “squirrel-eyed gal from Memphis,” whom he’d married when she was young, who was still young when she died of lung cancer.

  Much more often, however, when the subject of sex came up, he would return to the idea of there having been a homoerotic side to the Agrarian movement itself. He told me that Allen Tate propositioned him once, “but I turned him down. I didn’t like his smell. You see, smell is so important, beloved. To me he had the stale scent of a man who didn’t take any exercise.” This may or may not have been true, but it wasn’t an isolated example. Later writers, including some with an interest in not playing up the issue, have noticed, for instance, Robert Penn Warren’s more-than-platonic interest in Tate, when they were all at Vanderbilt together. One of the other Twelve Southerners, Stark Young—he’s rarely mentioned—was openly gay. Lytle professed to have carried on, as a very young man, a happy, sporadic affair with the brother of another Fugitive poet, not a well-known person. At one point the two of them fantasized about living together, on a small farm. The man later disappeared and turned up murdered in Mexico. Warren mentions him in a poem that plays with the image of the closet.

  The point is that you can’t fully understand that movement, which went on to influence American literature for decades, without understanding that certain of the writers involved in it loved one another. Most “homosocially,” of course, but a few homoerotically, and some homosexually. That’s where part of the power originated that made those friendships so intense, and caused the men to stay united almost all their lives, even after spats and changes of opinion, even after their Utopian hopes for the South had died. Together they produced from among them a number of good writers, and even a great one, in Warren, whom they can be seen to have lifted, as if on wing beats, to the heights for which he was destined.

  Lytle would have beaten me with his cane and thrown me out for saying all that. To him it was a matter for winking and nodding, frontier sexuality, fraternity brothers falling into bed with each other and not thinking much
about it. Or else it was Hellenism, golden lads in the Court of the Muse, William Alexander Percy stuff. Whatever it was, I accepted it. I never showed displeasure when he wanted to sit and watch me chop wood, or when he asked me to quit showering every morning, so that he could smell me better. “I’m pert’ near blind, boy,” he said. “How will I find you in a fire?” Still, I’d taken for granted an understanding between us. I didn’t expect him to grope me like a chambermaid.

  I stayed away two nights, but then went back. When I reached the top of the steps and looked through the back porch window, I saw him on the sofa lying asleep (or dead, I wondered every time). His hands were folded across his belly. One of them rose and hung quivering, an actor’s wave; he was talking to himself. It turned out, when I cracked the door, he was talking to me.

  “Beloved, now, we must forget this,” he said. “I merely wanted to touch it a little. You see, I find it the most interesting part of the body.”

  Then he paused and said, “Yes,” seeming to make a mental note that the phrase would do.

  “I understand, you have the girl now,” he continued. “Woman offers the things a man must have, home and children. And she’s a lovely girl. I myself may not have made the proper choices, in that role.”

  I crept down to bed.

  Not long after, I moved out. He agreed it was for the best. I reenrolled at the school. They found someone else to live with him. It had become more of a medical situation by that point, at-home care. I drove out to see him every week, and I like to think he welcomed the visits, but things had changed. He knew how to adjust his formality by tenths of a degree, to let you know where you stood.

  * * *

  It may be gratuitous to remark of a ninety-two-year-old man that he began to die, but Lytle had been much alive for most of that year, fiercely so. There were some needless minor surgeries at one point, which set him back. It’s funny how the living will help the dying along. One night he fell, right in front of me. He was standing in the middle room on a slippery carpet, and I was moving toward him to take a glass from his hand. The next instant he was flat on his back with a broken elbow that during the night bruised horribly, blackly. His eyes went from glossy to matte. Different people took turns staying over with him, upstairs, including the white-haired professor, whose loyalty had never wavered. I spent a couple of nights. I wasn’t worried he’d try anything again. He was in a place of calm and—you could see it—preparation. His son-in-law told me he’d spoken my name the day before he died.

  When the coffin was done, the men from the funeral home picked it up in a hearse. Late the same night someone called to say they’d finished embalming Lytle’s body; it was in the chapel, and whenever Roehm was ready, he could come and fasten the lid. All of us who’d worked on it with him went, too. The mortician let us into a glowing side hallway off the cold ambulatory. With us was an old friend of Lytle’s named Brush, who worked for the school administration, a low-built, bouncy muscular man with boyish dark hair and a perpetual bow tie. He carried, as nonchalantly as he could, a bowling ball bag, and in the bag an extremely excellent bottle of whiskey.

  Brush took a deep breath, reached into the coffin, and jammed the bottle up into the crevice between Lytle’s rib cage and his left arm. He turned and said, “That way they won’t hear it knocking around when we roll it out of the church.”

  Roehm had a massive electric drill in his hand. It seemed out of keeping with the artisanal methods that had gone into the rest of the job, but he’d run out of time making the cedar pegs. We stood over Lytle’s body. Sanford was the first to kiss him. When everyone had, we lowered the lid onto the box, and Roehm screwed it down. Somebody wished the old man Godspeed. A eulogy that ran in the subsequent number of The Sewanee Review said that, with Lytle’s death, “the Confederacy at last came to its end.”

  He appeared to me only once afterward, and that was two and a half years later, in Paris. It’s not as if Paris is a city I know or have even visited more than a couple of times. He knew it well. I was coming up the stairs from the metro into the sunshine with the girl, whom I later married, on my left arm, when my senses became intensely alert to his presence about a foot and a half to my right. I couldn’t look directly at him: I had to let him hang back in my peripheral vision, else he’d slip away. It was a bargain we made in silence. I could see enough to tell that he wasn’t young but was maybe twenty years younger than when I’d known him, wearing the black-framed engineer’s glasses he’d worn at just that time in his life, looking up and very serious, climbing the steps to the light, where I lost him.

  AT A SHELTER (AFTER KATRINA)

  Coming east along the Gulf, you started picking up signs around Slidell that something ungodly had passed through there. Whole stands of mature pine had been chopped down at the knees, as if by shock wave. And the huge black metal poles that hold up highway billboards, many of those were bent in half, the upper parts dangling by spiky hinges. Weirdest of all was the roadkill. There’s always plenty in Mississippi, but now, among the raccoons and the deer and the occasional armadillo, you saw dogs, more than a few, healthy-looking apart from being dead, and with collars on—not strays, in other words, or not until a few days before. And the little black vultures they have down there, with gray, beaked faces like Venetian masks, were hopping up out of the brush to pick at them.

  That was the outer edge of what the hurricane had done. By the time you reached the coast in Gulfport, there was a smell in the air you couldn’t tolerate for longer than forty-five seconds or so. I’d smelled it before but never in the First World. It was the smell of large organic things that had lain dead under a burning sun for days. Dozens of semitrailers and boats—ships, really—had been picked up and hurled half a mile, just spun around and crunched. It looked contrary to the laws of physics, to the point where you saw it in miniature, a toy box overturned by an angry child. Perfectly clean wood frames stood where some very substantial houses had been. The wind and water had simply moved through them, stripping away every brick and board and shingle. Even the toilet bowls were blasted out.

  Katrina created what was almost certainly the largest storm surge ever recorded in the United States: official numbers are still forthcoming, but it was around thirty feet. A lot of the people who died in Mississippi did so because this inundation happened horrifically fast. You were listening to the wind at your windows, wondering if you should flee, then you were trying to grab at the uppermost limbs of trees as you went rushing by. One older woman told me a giant sea turtle swam through her kitchen while she perched on the counter.

  In the Red Cross shelter at Harrison Central Elementary School in Gulfport, you kept hearing people say they’d “swum out the front door.” One was Terry DeShields, a trim, muscular black guy with a neat mustache and a bad, healed burn on his left arm. The hurricane had made landfall on his thirty-fifth birthday. He’d been sitting on his couch and thinking to himself, I’m not gonna run from this thing. He took a nap. He woke up and there was seven feet of water in his house. “I heard the rumbling,” he said, “and I thought, Oh, Lord, here we go!” He made it through the door just seconds before the surge “pushed the walls out.”

  “The wind’s blowing me around,” he said. “I’m hitting trees. There’s snakes swimming around—and I ain’t no friend to snakes.”

  DeShields was tossed through his old neighborhood, searching for something to climb. He was carried to the rear parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. There he saw two convection ovens, one stacked atop the other, and bolted down. The upper one was still above the waterline. He hoisted himself onto it and curled into a ball. The hurricane roared around him for hours. That seemed like a long time to think, so I asked him what he thought about. “Pretty simple,” he said. “I am going to die.”

  When the water fell back, he climbed down and set out, looking for food. “There wasn’t no shelters yet,” he said. “Least I didn’t know where.” He had on a pair of underwear and one sock. He wandered for tw
o days in scorching heat. He slept on the ground in the woods. When I talked to him, his hands were still puffed up like mittens from the mosquito bites. Finally, a state trooper passed him and gave him a packet of crackers and a hot can of Coca-Cola and pointed him toward the shelter. “When I saw that cross,” he said, “I knew I was saved.”

  And yet the next night he snuck out, slipping back to a beach not far from where his house had stood. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “That was my beach, you know. I had to see it. Gone. All those mansions, casinos. The sidewalk, man. I sat there till four o’clock in the morning and cried.”

  There was an older man, wiry and dark, who looked to be in his late fifties. He had a single tooth on each side of his smile, perfectly spaced. His name was Ernel Porché, but at the shelter they called him Boots, because he’d escaped his house with a pair of dirty white oversize galoshes on and hadn’t wanted to change them since. He told me he was worried about his aunt. “We’re a small family,” he said. “I don’t know if she got out.” When the man from the Red Cross had first switched on the TV and put it to CNN, Boots saw a picture of his aunt’s neighborhood. It was underwater. “That was very disturbing,” he said.

  Gone. That was the word everybody used. What about your house? Did it hit your house? “Oh, that’s gone, honey. That’s all gone.” The walls “was blowed out.” The future had been ripped away and replaced with a massive blank. You asked people what they were going to do, where they’d end up, how long they’d be allowed to stay at the shelter. They looked at you like they were thinking hard about something else.

  * * *

  It was past lights-out. The generator was powering only a string of emergency lights that lined the middle hallway, where people lay sleeping on bedrolls. I got assigned a spot in a little classroom with construction-paper pictures on the wall. Plenty of folks were still up, though, whispering in clusters. You could hear babies crying. An old, long-bearded white guy with no shirt on and sagging hairy man-breasts was coughing, a terrible hacking cough. “There’s a pill sticking sideways in my throat!” he croaked. Another guy kept reminding the shelter manager that he was severely manic and had been off his meds for five days now. “And you know what it’s like when you’re off your meds!” I’d heard him by then say to at least four people. I heard a woman tell the manager that the Red Cross needed to “put the censorship on the TV,” because she’d caught some children in the cafeteria watching a sex movie. “It was the real dirty stuff,” she said, “people sucking on each other’s nipples and everything.”