from ""The Amanuensis," by Mark Van de Walle

("Poolside at the Beat Hotel" by Michael Childers

from The Paris Review.)

Here is an excerpt from Mark Van de Walle's memoir, "The Amanuensis," appearing online at The Paris Review. The story continues in "The Offer" and concludes with "The Departure." Van de Walle was researching a cultural history of trailer parks in America and was in Rancho Mirage, California, when he became acquainted with the caretaker of The Beat Hotel -- a desert recreation of the Paris haunt of Beat writers in the 1950s and 1960s. Magnets for Misery, Van de Walle's cultural history of trailer parks in America, was published in 2004.

... But Steve wasn’t famous, exactly. Instead, he lived in a state that was stranger and less easy to define than fame. He was the center of an elaborate network of near-mystical coincidence whose tendrils apparently ran everywhere, touching all aspects of his life, from the most prosaic to the most rarefied. Often, these two converged, as they did with the green Converse high-tops.

These were the shoes Steve was wearing when he left his loft in SoHo in a daze shortly after being fired from his job writing porn novels, which he’d been churning out at a rate of 175 pages a week for about two years. William Burroughs was wearing the very same green Converse high-tops that afternoon in 1974, and this was enough to get him to slow down and make eye contact, and then conversation, with Steve. If they hadn’t been wearing identical shoes, the two writers might not have stopped on the street in front of the Atomic Machine Parts Factory, and Burroughs might never have asked Steve to help him with Cities of the Red Night, the book he was having such trouble with.

And who knows? Maybe, without Steve, Burroughs’s writers block might have become permanent and he wouldn’t have become the High Priest of Outlaw Writers. This kind of thing happened to Steve all the time: he seemed always to arrive in the right place at exactly the right time. He made it possible for things to happen. Steve was the man behind the scenes, invisible but essential.

... Steve was relentless in his enthusiasms; he was also always seconds away from sliding into hysteria. The pigeons made him slide. “It’s killing me to constantly get dragged down by this mundane-detail shit. Killing me!”

It was funny to hear Steve complain about how details were killing him, since he had a greater capacity for worrying about details than anyone I’d ever met. Take, for example, the interior paint in the hotel: it was beige. It was not, however, just any beige; it was a custom beige. And it wasn’t an ordinary custom beige (insofar as such a thing is possible); this shade of beige could only be properly mixed, Steve swore, by one clerk at the Lowe’s Home Improvement Megacenter in Rancho Mirage.

This clerk worked only part-time, preferring to devote himself to the various duties accruing to the title of Mr. Leather Palm Springs, which he’d held for two years. Periodically, the clerk would intimate that he might leave Lowe’s altogether and go full-time on the chaps-and-harness circuit. This sent Steve into paroxysms of fear. Every scratch or scuff was a tragedy, every trip to the hardware store attended by a junkie’s anxiety — Will the Man be there? Will he have the Good Stuff?

Still, my girlfriend swore that the extremely particular beige Steve and Mr. Leather developed together really was the perfect beige, and that it was absolutely worth all the trouble. Everything at the new Beat Hotel was like that: austere to the point of near invisibility and crazily fussy. ...

Edgar Allan Poe and "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"

"Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company!"

(from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1838)

Terry Southern once quipped that the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was never found in high school reading lists "by virtue of its extreme weirdness." Today, it seems that the Gothic overtones of Poe's own life (and death) continue to make his an American story of excess and a mythic, singular literary weirdness of its own.

By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go; in his surviving papers he left begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, then suffered a death far more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.

It began badly when he was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died four days later, on October 7, 1849, in the hospital, having uttered the final words: "Lord, help my poor soul."

From there it only got worse, although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America. His cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than ten people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.

But since his pauper's death Poe has left a rich and extraordinary literary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, and to the story-telling style of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His stories also sparked the expansive and creative imagination of Jules Verne.

His "Balloon Hoax" of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon -- cuts a straight path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds 94 years later. And Dan Brown's huge success with The Da Vinci Code would have been impossible without Poe's "The Gold-Bug," in which Poe incorporated ciphers as part of the story.

But it is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket -- Poe's only complete novel -- that sends grisly shivers down the spines of many readers. Its bizarre images of cannibalism, unexplained plague, and travelers shouting to the dead on a doomed vessel (and the fear of the dead receiving them "in their goodly company") are elements in a unique horror tale that should find a prominent place in today's ever-expanding pop market of vampires and zombies and flesh-eaters of all kinds:

At this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound. We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead. On his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood.

Poe himself brings the story to an uncertain, abrupt edge-of-the-world end that leaves the tale unresolved: the boat is headed through a final portal guided by a ghostly, white figure that suggests beyond is the South Pole -- or another world entirely, marked with Arabic signs and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

In 2009, to the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities -- notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston -- to claim "ownership" of the writer.

In Baltimore, nearly 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe finally was given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. A life-size recreation of his body was carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground, where not one, but two full-length ceremonies were held in front of an estimated 700 admirers.

Playing their ace card, organizers of the Baltimore funeral put out a press release: "We have the body!"

"There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him," said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association. Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century -- Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name but three -- Poe had the most hapless existence. "Poor Edgar Allan Poe, of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious," Rachman said.

"Gravely Concerned": From Poe to Thomas Holley Chivers, a tour of writers' graves

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
(Mark Twain, 1898)

Much like the recent unpleasantness between the states from 1861-1865, the topic of death has an unshakable hold on the Southern imagination. Maybe that fascination springs from the rural tradition of long-told family stories: of ghosts and haints, lost relatives and ne'er-do-wells, and other human mysteries that make this conscious life only a pause on eternity's long road. In the South death takes on a mythical stature unparalleled elsewhere in America. People do talk about their long-gone ancestors as if those ancient folk were sitting, here today, on the porch having a glass of tea.

This embrace of the past, indeed the near-physical presence of the departed, is a romantic idea expressed in the over-use of the word Gothic when applied to the Southern sensibility. There is no mistaking the haunting tales of Edgar Allan Poe as anything but Southern, and the Gothic continues to be a part of the regional feel. As Howard Bahr, writing from Jackson, Mississippi, remarks in the book's foreword as if a plume of one of W.J. Cash's Cavaliers were still in his hat:

I believe that a walk through a cemetery is no intrusion but first, a sojourn into the past and, second, a glimpse into the future of our ephemeral selves. I see no possible harm in walking over a grave, and I think it proper that a man should sit on a tombstone, smoke his pipe, and contemplate his own mortality while the mockingbirds sing in the oaks. I believe the dead, so far as they may be aware, find such occasions enjoyable: footsteps of a visitor from the world they left behind come to acknowledge them as fellow travelers, no different from us but only gone ahead. ... This, I have found, is the artist's view as well.

Graves of Robert Penn Warren and his wife Eleanor, Stratton VT.

Which makes John Soward Bayne's new book Gravely Concerned (Clemson University Digital Press) a regional celebrity-search of the famous and infamous writers who had much to do with creating the unique Southern imagination. The book is less haunted by morbid curiosity than it is an evocative visual record of where many writers associated with the South have chosen to spend eternity.

In some cases a choice was not offered: in 1973 Alice Walker determined the resting site of Zora Neale Hurston by calling out "Zora, where are you?" in an Eatonton, Florida cemetery to locate the writer's unmarked grave -- in itself an absolutely fitting Southern tale.

In other cases these sites, some elaborate and others more simple, reflect the reputations of the writers themselves in their lifetime and (one presumes) in the life beyond. They become points of pilgrimage for fans and the curious: Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, William Faulkner (and his brothers) in Oxford Mississippi, Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, whose Poe Toaster tradition as of 2009 may be nevermore.

Yet there are many more -- regional writers whose legacies are less well known but whose fictions are part of the Southern fabric. Bayne began his photography project in 2003 with a mathematician's exactness and a reading fan's zeal, sometimes traveling by Greyhound overnight through Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas to locate a particular site.

Over the course of pages the book becomes a treasury of Southern names: John Trotwood Moore. Abbie Mandana Holmes Christiansen. Beatrice Whitte Ravenel. William Tappan Thompson. Thomas Holley Chivers. Douglas Southall Freeman. John Peale Bishop. Hubert Creekmore. Katherine Drayton Mayrant Simons.

It's understood if the casually curious may only be interested in tracking down Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, but where does one go to seek the disputed last rest of Truman Capote? That eternal gadabout may be buried in L.A.'s Westwood Memorial Park (a final cocktail party of sorts, surrounded by celebrities) -- or his ashes may be scattered at Crooked Pond near Bridgehampton, NY.

Many Southern writers are buried here, but not all. Although Mark Twain's grave is featured on the book's cover, in a recent discussion Bayne said he doesn't really consider Twain a Southern writer: born in Missouri, lived in Connecticut, he married a Yankee girl from Elmira NY and wrote several of his novels during 22 summers there. The serial bankrupt Clemens is buried in his wife's family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. At Woodlawn, driving directions are posted Mark Twain next left, as if it were a kind of final and continuing receiving line for the humorist -- or an eternal advertisement posted by his admirers.

On the other hand, there is the resting place of James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) marked by an large and unchiseled boulder on his farm, also in upstate NY.

Eudora Welty gravesite, Jackson, MS

Monuments with their names and dates chiseled in stone offer many writers the opportunity for a final parting shot, or piece of wisdom on view for eternity. In his preface Bayne offers these: Among the best are T.S. Stribling's 'Through this dust these hills once spoke" and Ben Robertson's "I rest in thy bosom, Carolina, thy skies over me, thine air above and around me. Among my own and in my own country I sleep.'

Not all are quite so serious; some epitaphs are examples of the special Southern wit. On April 20, 2008, a monument was unveiled on the overlooked and presumed grave of George Washington Harris, with a new epigraph from the humorist's own fictional creation, "Parson Bullen's Oration Over the Corpse of Sut Lovingood": Let us try and ricollect his virtues -- ef he had any -- and forget his vices -- ef we can. For of such air the kingdom of heaven!"

John Soward Bayne

Bayne himself was born in Lenoir City, Tennessee, grew up in Anderson, South Carolina, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Clemson University, impeccable Southern bona fides on the Gravely Concerned website. So it's no surprise that his book, in its elegiac tone, suggests a certain urgent prompting to the procrastination of aspiring Southern writers and other present-day scribblers:

So, pilgrim, pass by. Be not reluctant at your author's grave. Look at the name indited in stone: what lies beneath the name is only dust, of course, but what lies behind it is the record of the artist's suffering and the true monument that is his or her work. Remember that this person once walked the earth, felt the compulsion to create, suffered rejection and frustration, just as you will do, have done, if you have chosen the writer's craft. Ask your questions; you may be astonished at the reply.