Meriwether Redux

 “I fear O! I fear the waight of his mind has come over him, what will be the Consequence?”
– William Clark

lewisAlthough I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence of it, I keep hearing rumors that Meriwether Lewis attended school at Liberty Hall, the forerunner of Washington and Lee University.  I’d like to know the facts of the matter, but I’m more intrigued by the controversy surrounding the unfortunate explorer’s death than his education, which was probably at the hands of a couple of Virginians who were tutors, independent contractors and not employed by institutions.

As we know from the Journals of Lewis, Clark, Ordway and their traveling companions (and more recently, from Ken Burns’ documentary “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery”), Lewis was a brave and resourceful man, a master of logistics who could also shoot, draw, heal (after his mother, an herbalist), negotiate and take risks.  And he was a serious depressive whose post-safari life was neither prosperous nor fulfilling.  But he could write up a storm – narrative, description, speculation.  No wonder Jefferson hired Lewis on as his private secretary; no wonder the President selected his protégé to travel to territories as uncharted and mysterious back then as the moon.  The story of the search for a water route to the Pacific is one of our most astonishing, almost the American Arabian Nights, but when the rivers were mapped, the treaties established, the grizzlies and candlefish and mosquitoes discovered, described, catalogued and shipped home, Lewis had to move among and discourse with the earthmen again, and he was not cut out for that.

corpsHe was especially not possessed of the right temperament to be the Governor of Louisiana, and though he’d been a wonder of frugality and accountability on the great expedition, finances or at least financial records down on the bayou went awry.  Amok, really.  Reimbursements and receipts, bids and balances, debts and conflicts of interest – he was out of his element and attracted rivals and enemies like honey draws ants.  He took strong measures of brandy and laudanum.  He began to speak to phantoms and mists.  In the autumn of 1809 he headed east to try to explain himself to his mentor and benefactor, the Wizard of Monticello.

A companion named Neely, some servants and hard roads.  Rain and more rain.  Early in the journey he tried to take his own life.  Maybe twice.  Then on the evening of October 10, traveling the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, he arrived at a dogtrot tavern called Grinder’s Stand, offering bed (or pallet) and meager fare for beleaguered wanderers amid the border ruffians and hard weathers of the frontier.  The owners were Robert Grinder (away on business) and his wife Priscilla (present, and later, suspected, though not officially accused).  There were other guests; reports on their number vary.  He had a purse that disappeared.  He was almost incoherent (as Mrs. Grinder later said, like a man recently returned from the moon).  Anyway, nocturnal events transpired.  In the morning, Captain Lewis was dead, certainly shot, maybe cut, perhaps in his room or just outside, maybe on the bank of the nearby creek.  Though shots had been heard in the night, horsemen passing (not uncommon), no one had mounted a rescue attempt or even a curious inquiry.  Assassination? Quarrel, followed by murder?  Suicide?  Stephen Ambrose and a whole cadre of historians have passed the verdict of self-murder.  It’s the story taught in the schools, and if the election were held today, I’d vote with that party, as did William Clark and Jefferson (who would later write that Lewis suffered from “hypochondriacal affection”) when the grim news reached them.  The more recent Vardis Fisher murder-most-foul contingent has never convinced me.

Still, the common thread amid the conflicting reports is that he was shot at least twice, once in the chest, once in the head.  He may also have been slashed with a razor.

The core of the controversy is a set of documents, which I’ve seen only excerpts from and which relate the multiple and contradictory testimonies of Mrs. Grinder, who could not seem to settle on the number of bullet wounds or the location of the body and who had no persuasive explanation for not investigating the shots in the night.  She was either rattled by the investigation or keeping secrets; we’ll never know.  Why her husband, miles distant on that peculiar night, was actually charged is a matter for forensic historians to dance around for years.  Frontier record keeping has never been an art.  I do not believe for a moment accepted that the premise that the husband came home to catch Priscilla and Meriwether in flagrante.  That was not the Governor’s inclination nor the likely outcome of a frightened and frightening night, which early evening guests described as akin to a mad scene in a play.  Lewis was haunted; he was looking back, and something was gaining on him.  His history of misery is impressive.  His circumstances at the time made him right for despair, and he was like an evangelist spreading the gospel of panic.

Campaigns for exhumation in the name of justice or truth have never been successful, and now it’s a little late for the most astute cold case coroner.  So here’s my spin, which ignores much of Ambrose’s narrative of the end, as he seems to be extrapolating, right down to inventing dialogue).  Convinced that assassins dispatched by an enemy in Louisiana were hovering and that his mission was doomed, deep into self-medication with incompatible substances, fatigued and ashamed, he lay sleepless and fretful on his bison pelt pallet and aimed his pistols at his own head and heart, a strategy reasonable for a man whose earlier attempts had failed, a man who felt his soul was broken and who did not intend to fail again.

He was thirty-five.

flint

Did Lewis attend the precursor of Washington and Lee before its financial boost from the former and the charismatic leadership of the latter?  If so, he left no mark, no signature.  But the dregs of his dust have long blended with earth beneath a monument in what is now called Lewis County, Tennessee.  An inscription on the south face of the stone records “his melancholy death,” but the indelible and inspiring story we still tell revives that part of his life spent suffering the deprivations of the wilderness, smoking in the lodges of Mandans and Shoshones, mapping and naming botanical specimens, hunting game and stars for celestial calculations, and enduring all manner of ailments, eating countless dogs and roots and boiled jerkins, and through it all anxious and haunted by his own unshakable inner shadow, nonetheless forever amazed.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Who Was Ginny Hensley?

A Little Riff on Patsy Cline, Beginning in Lexington, VA

PatsyClineartIn Honky Tonk Angel, the Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (St. Martin’s, 1993, a reprint from a 1981 Leisure Book), the earlier of the two Cline biographies I’ve recently become familiar with, Ellis Nassour devotes one sentence to the time Virginia Paterson Hensley (later to marry a Cline and promote a version of her middle name on the way to “Midnight”and “I Fall” and “Crazy”) spent in Lexington, Virginia, and claims her father was a fireman for the boiler room of Virginia Military Institute.  In the newer book, Douglas Gomery’s typographically flawed Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon (Trafford, 2011) , the author devotes eleven pages to Ginny’s life in the Lost Cause capital from 1937 to 1942 and speculates considerably on what music she might have heard during those years, all based on extensive research on which musicians actually performed at VMI and Washington and Lee (Sam Hensley’s actual employer during that spell).

Not everything is speculation for Gomery.  The Hensleys lived just above Woods Creek in a house owned by WLU and featuring electricity and indoor plumbing.  While they lived there, Ginny attended school, treasured her radio and for a spell had a piano, on which she learned to play songs she heard on the radio.  She attended West Lexington School for three years, lived above the poverty line and was already known to have musical ambitions.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Gomery’s book is the detail in which he reveals the bands, leaders, singers and hits that flowed through Lexington, as WLU and VLI competed for prestige big bands for their various (and many) social events, especially WLU’s Fancy Dress Ball.  Visitors included Whiteman, Kemp, Krupa, Sinatra, Harry James, Ozzie Nelson and most notably, for Gomery’s money, the vocalist Dolly Dawn, whom he credits as Ginny/Patsy’s primary model and who, from all I can figure, previously sang as Loretta Lee but may have been born Theresa Anna Maria Stabile in Newark.

One thing that fascinates me about this biography (almost a hagiography, as the author’s current title is “Official Historian for Celebrating Patsy Cline”) is the meticulous research into the music scene in Lexington and the (feasible) link to the little girl on Woods Creek.  Gomery is certain that hearing all these amazing arrangers, musicians and crooners (along with the radio, of course) provides the bedrock of all Cline’s musical appetites and aptitudes.  However, he scarcely even claims that Ginny actually attended a dance or a concert, that proximity, permission and acoustics allowed her to actually eavesdrop on the goings on of the “white elite paradise,” as Gomery calls Lexington.  Granted, once he says, she “may actually have heard Glenn Miller if her parents allowed her to walk the hundred yards from her house to sit across from the VMI gym and listen.  But geography is a strange thing — Gomery has Hollins College 70 miles from Lexington — today it’s about twenty miles closer.  And his caution here suggests either that Ginny’s musical “allowance” was not generous or that the WLU dance sites were much closer and listening in an easy matter.  However, he does not say it.

But I do want to believe.  I want to have some testimony to aid my imagination — either the small girl lurks in the shadows of the musical venues or she just eases open the sash of her bedroom window and listens as blues, boogie-woogie and swing fill the atmosphere.  Because I desperately want to picture her breathing the night air and trying to accompany the music that may have come from a source invisible to her, I’d be an easy sell.  But Gomery never bothers with the mechanism. Does the Boilerman’s Daughter get a courtesy pass to attend events?  Does she have to steal out the window to get close to the tremelo and glissando and blaring horns, the mercury of Ginny Simms’ and Dolly Dawn’s voices?  Perhaps I’ll never know, but I relish the thought, even if I have to invent the details.

Why do we need two biographies of the now-iconic and legend-shrouded Grand Ole Opry star who did not sound country and made her reputation with bluesy pop songs before she was killed in a plane crash at 30?  My answer’s simple.  We need Gomery for the early life, the encyclopedic accounts of who, when, where and why concerning every Moose Hall concert, recording session, Arthur Godfrey TV appearance, costume decision.  We also need read him for the chapter entitled “Patsy Cline’s Musical Heritage,” which explores how pitch, tempo, instrumentation, phrasing and bending or flatting toward blue notes made Cline’s vocal performances remarkable, original and complex in ways she, who could not read music, might have been able to explain emotionally but not musically.

Not that Nassour is a slouch in following the narrative.  And he is the better (more correct, less cliched, less repetitious) writer of the two.  But he also exposes the dark, battling side of Patsy, her two hard marriages (to Gerald Cline and Charlie Dick) and attendant C & W lifestyle, which Gomery soft-pedals.  It is in Honky-Tonk Angel that I became familiar with the tough gal who called most men and some women “Hoss” and who cusses like a sailor and (during her first marriage) displays an unrestrained, unapologetic and wild sexual appetite, at times selecting her “victim” at first sight and at others laying siege to a fellow performer until he gives in.  This is the “rough south” Patsy, who balances out the generous, chatty, fiercely professional woman the keepers of her reputation would emphasize.

Patsy Cline came to maturity in the fifties and was not immune to the allure of housewifery, but she was also a competitive, ambitious and confident vocal artist who negotiated a remarkable path between the cowgal singer in fringe and Stetson and the cocktail pop smooth torch singer, but either she internalized the hurt songs and heart songs like “Sweet Dreams” and “She’s Got You,” or she was a remarkable actress.  Either way, her life story makes a fascinating appendix to the songs which she inscribed on the American psyche, and one accessible and valuable introduction I keep close at hand is the MCA Records CD “The Patsy Cline Story,”  which includes a quarter of her approximately 100 recorded songs.  YouTube’s not a bad place to start, either.  Happy trails.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

R. T. Smith on SHERBURNE

Chloe Bellomy interviews Washington and Lee Writer-in-Residence R. T. Smith on his new collection of stories, Sherburne.

http://vimeo.com/39848442

R. T. Smith reading from Sherburne:

http://youtu.be/Q0VSJRNND6g


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.