Street, passing by its row of dignified mansions, Gene Norris told me of some of the great families who lived in those houses—the Fordhams, the Dowlings, the Trasks—and gave me brief histories of each family and the importance they had played in the making of the town. Stories leaked out of every windowsill and doorway we passed. On our left was the Jewish cemetery, which sent Gene into another reverie as he built his tales around the fortunes of the Lipsitz family as well as the Keyserlings and the Scheins.
I must have ridden out with Gene Norris thirty times in the two years I was at Beaufort High School, and I consider the time I spent with him as valuable as any college education could be. He taught me to value the old, to sharpen my eye for the most intricate detail, and to strengthen all the appetites upon which beauty itself fed. But most of all, Gene Norrishanded me a different model of how to conduct myself as a man, showing me that a man could behave with sensibility and restraint and that a love of language and art could sustain him. Unlike a ride in my father’s car, I never feared a backhand from my English teacher or a cuffed head or blood running down my face for displeasing the marine aviator. My father never talked to me about anything, so I discovered I loved being in a car with a man whose stories issued out in ceaseless tides. Gene Norris spoke with a storyteller’s voice, and it felt like I was sitting next to Homer as he sang out in his blindness the illustrious stories of the fall of Troy. In the end, Gene Norris handed me the key to my first hometown and made it feel like the most sublime gift.
So I set a claim on Beaufort, South Carolina, the first town in America I ever called home. Though I have lived out my adult life in Atlanta, San Francisco, Paris, and Rome, it is the small town of Beaufort that still has a mortgage on my heart. All of my novels smell of the marshes, the pages wet with storm water born in the creeks that feed into the Beaufort River. I wrote the prologue to
The Prince of Tides
while living on the Via dei Forragi in Rome, aching with homesickness for Beaufort so urgently that I brought the Low Country to Italy. I can go nowhere on earth without hungering for the South Carolina Low Country. I carry its taste in my mouth, and I have smelled its fragrant marshes when I walked on a cobbled road in Ephesus where St. Paul preached a sermon, or when I studied a pyramid near Cairo, or when I contemplated the haunches of a statue of Buddha in Thailand.
I came back to Beaufort County for good in 1993 to rest my soul from the whirlwind that had become my life. I bought a house on Fripp Island, where my mother was living when she died of leukemia in 1984. When the weather is fine, I swim in the Atlantic Ocean twice a day—once in the morning, once again at sundown. One morning, I awoke and found hundreds of snowy egrets surrounding the lagoon that sits behind my house, locked in an elaborate mating ritual that contained the mysteries of dance itself. White-tailed deer roam the island in silent brown herds. From trees in my yard, ospreys hunt mullet in the lagoon. The bones of an enormous sixteen-foot alligator washed up on the island last month. Aten-foot alligator uses my yard as a highway to get to a lagoon that sits on a golf course. We have met, with some discomfort on both sides, on four occasions now.
When friends come to town, I give them my tour of Beaufort in honor of our friendship. It is, quite simply, a continuation of my rides in Gene Norris’s Buick when he could not pass a house without telling me a story about the people who lived there. But now, I have added my own history to the tour. I show the houses where Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner lived while making
The Great Santini
or the houses where Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte lived while they were filming
The Prince of Tides
. Then I show them the house where I met my first wife, Barbara, and the first house we
I must have ridden out with Gene Norris thirty times in the two years I was at Beaufort High School, and I consider the time I spent with him as valuable as any college education could be. He taught me to value the old, to sharpen my eye for the most intricate detail, and to strengthen all the appetites upon which beauty itself fed. But most of all, Gene Norrishanded me a different model of how to conduct myself as a man, showing me that a man could behave with sensibility and restraint and that a love of language and art could sustain him. Unlike a ride in my father’s car, I never feared a backhand from my English teacher or a cuffed head or blood running down my face for displeasing the marine aviator. My father never talked to me about anything, so I discovered I loved being in a car with a man whose stories issued out in ceaseless tides. Gene Norris spoke with a storyteller’s voice, and it felt like I was sitting next to Homer as he sang out in his blindness the illustrious stories of the fall of Troy. In the end, Gene Norris handed me the key to my first hometown and made it feel like the most sublime gift.
So I set a claim on Beaufort, South Carolina, the first town in America I ever called home. Though I have lived out my adult life in Atlanta, San Francisco, Paris, and Rome, it is the small town of Beaufort that still has a mortgage on my heart. All of my novels smell of the marshes, the pages wet with storm water born in the creeks that feed into the Beaufort River. I wrote the prologue to
The Prince of Tides
while living on the Via dei Forragi in Rome, aching with homesickness for Beaufort so urgently that I brought the Low Country to Italy. I can go nowhere on earth without hungering for the South Carolina Low Country. I carry its taste in my mouth, and I have smelled its fragrant marshes when I walked on a cobbled road in Ephesus where St. Paul preached a sermon, or when I studied a pyramid near Cairo, or when I contemplated the haunches of a statue of Buddha in Thailand.
I came back to Beaufort County for good in 1993 to rest my soul from the whirlwind that had become my life. I bought a house on Fripp Island, where my mother was living when she died of leukemia in 1984. When the weather is fine, I swim in the Atlantic Ocean twice a day—once in the morning, once again at sundown. One morning, I awoke and found hundreds of snowy egrets surrounding the lagoon that sits behind my house, locked in an elaborate mating ritual that contained the mysteries of dance itself. White-tailed deer roam the island in silent brown herds. From trees in my yard, ospreys hunt mullet in the lagoon. The bones of an enormous sixteen-foot alligator washed up on the island last month. Aten-foot alligator uses my yard as a highway to get to a lagoon that sits on a golf course. We have met, with some discomfort on both sides, on four occasions now.
When friends come to town, I give them my tour of Beaufort in honor of our friendship. It is, quite simply, a continuation of my rides in Gene Norris’s Buick when he could not pass a house without telling me a story about the people who lived there. But now, I have added my own history to the tour. I show the houses where Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner lived while making
The Great Santini
or the houses where Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte lived while they were filming
The Prince of Tides
. Then I show them the house where I met my first wife, Barbara, and the first house we
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