Back
to THE ULTIMATE MIDNIGHT SITE
April 8, 1998 -- London Daily Telegraph
John Berendt's dark bestseller about Savannah has been made into a film. He talks to Quentin Curtis
The Lady Chablis is not quite Clint Eastwood's typical leading lady. The star of Eastwood's new movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, has, to be sure, the right mixture of sassiness and vulnerability, spirit and self-pitying surrender, to join Clint's gallery of conquests. She is undoubtedly beautiful, too: a proud black odalisque, taut and towering in her brightly coloured sequin gowns. Nor is it now unusual that Clint is her director rather than co-star. What is rather odd is that this lady is a man.
But then again, nothing to do with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the extraordinary bestseller on which the film is based, seems either likely or sane. John Berendt's book - a leisurely and luxuriant wallow in the weirdness of Southern life in Savannah, Georgia, with a twist of murder mystery - has become one of the biggest phenomena in American publishing history.
Disparaged by its original agent as "too regional", the book this January broke the record for consecutive weeks (182) on the New York Times top-10 bestseller list. It has sold two million copies in the US, and gone into 91 printings. It has also topped the bestseller lists of the UK, Australia and South Africa, among other countries.
It all began in the early 1980s, when, tired of overpriced New York and seduced by unprecedented cheap air fares, Berendt, a magazine journalist, started travelling South with friends. There, through his natural curiosity and love of lore and anecdote, he stumbled upon Savannah rather as a prospector's axe hits gold ore. "The people I met," he wrote, "were highly original, full-blown literary characters."
Along with Chablis, there was Luther Driggers, a dyspeptic inventor whose lovingly tended bottle of poison stood poised to infect the water system; Mandy, a belle who drove with her knees while grooming herself; and her lover, crapulent lawyer-cum-squatter and party-giver Joe Odom. And at the centre of it all was Jim Williams, the suave and wealthy antique dealer, owner and restorer of the magnificent Mercer House, whose shooting of his wild, young male lover gives the book its courtroom crux - murder or self-defence?
Berendt's book, which still isn't in paperback in the US (they're waiting for it to stop selling by the van-load in hardback), has not only changed the rules of the bestseller, it has affected Savannah itself. Revenue from tourism is up by 25 per cent since 1993, there are Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tours, and the book's more self-promoting characters have become celebrities.
Savannah is glad rather than resentful of the attention. In 1996, the mayor announced a John Berendt Day and temporarily named a main square after him. Berendt has been given the freedom of the city - twice.
The object of all this affection, sitting across a table from me in a midtown Manhattan restaurant, is bemused and distracted by all the hoopla but, you suspect, still enjoying it enormously. Berendt, a Dorian Grey-ish 58 years old, is refreshingly free of that celebrity false modesty that usually reeks of vanity.
He toiled for nearly a decade over Midnight - researching, writing, tirelessly revising - and he is pleased and proud at its reception. Above all, though, he loves to talk. That, after all, is where the book began: "Gossip. I sit down and I talk. And out come these fabulous stories."
But Midnight's huge appeal does not lie in salacious tittle-tattle. In this obscure, quaint but tortured town, Berendt found a story that dug deep into the American psyche. Jim Williams has the mien and aura of an Eighties Jay Gatsby: you never quite know whether he is a romantic or a criminal, or both. And Berendt's generosity as a storyteller chimes with Gatsby's narrator's belief that "reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope".
"It's not that I didn't have a point of view," explains Berendt. "But I exercised my judgment in selecting what to say about people. I also thought that, since I was a narrator, and you had to see the whole thing through my eyes, making judgments would turn people off. And my tone, which was wry and appreciative, having a good time, and affectionate with all the people, was exactly how I felt."
It is not only the characters that glow under Berendt's benign eye, but the South itself. In his book, the region, so often viewed in American writing in the darkest terms, as a place of moral confusion and social decay, is renewed, if not redeemed. It is its vast richness, its seeping in myth, that interests him.
"Southerners have a different way of talking," he says. "Tennessee Williams said they have a love of folly and fantasy, and a graphic way of expressing themselves - especially the women. That's the basic difference between North and South. I noticed that, in the South, people tell stories all the time and they embrace eccentrics. So everybody's life is a work of art - of performance art."
Literature as a performance is, in a way, Berendt's game. Since he left Harvard, his career has been mainly based in American magazines, in their golden "New Journalism" phase - largely at Esquire, of which he was once editor.
"I was brought up at Esquire," he says, "with pieces by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese, and everyone was doing that New Journalism reportage where you make it seem like a theatre piece or a short story. In Midnight, every character had a chapter, and each chapter had a sort of wholeness: beginning, middle, end; action and resolution; tension or humour - and surprises all the way through."
Yet this strange and enthralling pageant of a book has deeper resonances. The people of Savannah have a passion for the past, preserving not only buildings - as Jim Williams did - but their way of life of courtly curiosity. And the trials of Jim Williams (it took four before he was acquitted) confronted this antiquated order with the shock of the new - of homosexuality, violence and affray. The book becomes, in its affection for the Savannah life and description of the trial, a delicate study of conservatism, its virtues and its limits - a riveting subject for the country that is the most conservative of all.
The unsavoury side of the South is not shirked: its racism (though Berendt says that there is a civility between the races that, even if tinged by white paternalism, is preferrable to the open hostility of the North), its snobbery and hierarchical society. It's just that Berendt can't help being seduced by the oddballs who throng the streets.
In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, it is said that only one born in the South can understand the South. But maybe it needed an outsider to describe it. "All I did the first year," Berendt recalls, "was take notes and interview, because I knew, the longer I was there, the less strange the whole thing would seem."
Berendt admits that the book, his first, has been a burden as well as a boon. Hanging over him now is the dreadful spectre of the next work.
Gay Talese advised: "Don't write another book - the critics will kill you!" Everywhere he goes people ask whether they will be his next subject. Berendt is following leads in Venice, where he recently bought an apartment, in a story of "the duping of the incapacitated". But he says it has more the scope of a Henry James tale than a full-length book. Still, he says, the colour is there, and the stories - poured into his ear by the obliging locals.
Of course, you realise when you read Midnight that the process is not so simple or artless. In an emblematic passage, a lady tells Berendt in Bonaventure Cemetery of the fire that burnt down the plantation house that stood there, in the middle of a dinner party. The host continued to entertain and the guests toasted him.
"When the toasts were finished," she says, "the host threw his crystal glass against the trunk of an old oak tree, and each of the guests followed suit. Tradition has it that, if you listen closely on quiet nights, you can still hear the laughter and the shattering crystal glasses. I like to think of this place as the scene of the Eternal Party. What better place, in Savannah, to rest in peace for all time - where the party goes on and on."
The cadence of the prose, its suppressed poetry and sense of encroaching myth, you suspect, have less to do with what that lady said than Berendt's careful craft - the book's own endless feast.
He returned again and again to the writing, over seven years, waiting for "this clicking into place, when some thing works". The enjoyment of the reading was matched by the writing, the chatter of research resolving itself into another sort of dialogue.
"I find writing," Berendt says, "a conversation with myself. It's this back and forth, and, before you know it, you have a dialogue, and it's got better, because you have reasoned out something, and arrived at something you could never have predicted before starting. That's the pleasure I get. And that's even more fun than being on the bestseller list."
John Berendt's 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' is published in paperback in the UK by Vintage, at £6.99. The film is released here on April 17.