Christopher Benfey - Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

A LSO BY C HRISTOPHER B ENFEY

A Summer of Hummingbirds:
Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson,
Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics,
and the Opening of Old Japan

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World
of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable

The Double Life of Stephen Crane

RED BRICK,

BLACK MOUNTAIN,

WHITE CLAY

Reflections on Art, Family,
and Survival

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY

THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2012

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

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First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Christopher Benfey, 2012

All rights reserved

Illustration credits appear on page 275.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Benfey, Christopher E. G.

Red brick, Black Mountain, white clay : reflections on art, family, and survival / Christopher Benfey.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-56102-7

1. Art and societyUnited StatesHistory. 2. Benfey, Christopher E. G., 1954Family. 3. ArtisansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

N72.S6B398 2012 2011040208

701.03dc23

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For Rachel Thomas Benfey

And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?

Virginia Woolf

I grew up in a placid town in Indiana, close to the Ohio border, that boasted a Quaker college, a school-bus factory, and a brown, lackluster river called the Whitewater. The river cut the town in two, both geographically and morally. No liquor was sold on our side of the river, the dry or Quaker side. On the opposite bank, down in the bedraggled gully known as Happy Hollow, were the ruins of the Gennett record company, where some of the classic jazz recordings of the 1920s, by New Orleans luminaries such as Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, were pressed. A railroad was strung precariously along the river, and this, presumably, brought the unruly jazzmen to our town as they headed for Chicago. The Whitewater River, after wending its sluggish way through cornfields and limestone gorges and more nondescript small towns, dumped its murky contents into the far more impressive Ohio.

Our town was peaceful, as I say, almost officially so. Quakers opposed to slavery had come up from the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia early in the nineteenth century. Nostalgic for the fertile meadows and early spring of the South, they named their new settlement Richmond after their old capital city. Richmond had been a major station on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, when Levi Coffin, the famous conductor of the railroad, lived in the area, and the town had remained, uneasily, a Quaker town. Growing up there during the Vietnam War, I knew many conscientious objectorspacifists opposed to all war who, when drafted, were allowed to perform alternative service in hospitals or prisons instead of serving in the military. I didnt know a single soldier. My own older brother had filed for CO status when he reached the age of eighteen in 1968, which turned out to be a big year in the history of Richmond, Indiana.

Like children in small towns everywhere, we complained that nothing ever happened in Richmond. And then, one hot afternoon in April 1968, something did, when six blocks of our downtown disappeared in a gray mushroom cloud. Rumor had it that local whites, wary that racial violence might spread from Chicago in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King, had stockpiled explosives and weaponry in a sporting-goods store named, as I remember, Marting Arms. These men despised the Quakers as nigger lovers, but a gas leak turned their own weapons against them.

I had been playing string quartets in an old office building downtown earlier that Saturday, under the tyrannical eye and ear of an unforgiving German named Koerner.

I had barely crossed the Whitewater River, carrying my black viola case as I trudged across the G Street Bridge, when the explosion occurred. I watched the cloud unfurl in the blue sky like some Cold War nightmare of unutterable disaster, the kind we were warned about, cowering under our desks, during our civil defense drills at school. Forty-one people died that afternoon and more than 120 were injured, random victims of their neighbors fear and folly.

Several days later, as my friends and I helped in the cleanup, there were still unexploded shotgun shells along the rubble-strewn streets. The town fathers used the federal disaster relief funds to turn the downtown into a pedestrian mall, thus inadvertently delivering the death blow to an already moribund cluster of stores and two dank and dreary movie theaters, the State and the Tivoli, where we huddled on Friday nights dreaming of distant love and violence.

Many years later, when I had all but forgotten the explosion and was teachingas I had always promised myself that I would never doat a small college in a small town, just as my father had done before me, an unfamiliar student dropped by my office to ask if she might do an independent study with me on the Beat poets. To my surprise, she mentioned that she, too, had grown up in Richmond, Indiana. We had a long talk about every detail of the failed downtown: the terrible bookstore that didnt sell books, the more terrible restaurant that didnt sell food, and the area down by the Gennett factory on the river, which had become, she told me, something of a tourist destination for jazz fans.

I was about to turn fifty, and I had found myself surrendering increasingly to a retrospective mood tinged with a faint but unspecified melancholy. With her hair dyed pitch black, her ironic wit, and her taste for Kerouac and Gary Snyder, this messenger from the past brought Richmond back to life for me.

A week after our first conversation, I received an e-mail message from the dean, informing me that my student had dropped out of school. A few weeks later, back in Richmond, she sent me a photograph of the monument erected in memory of the victims of the 1968 explosion.