seem almost menacing. In midsummer we netted swarms of them with absurd ease from the village pier, using hunks of gamy meat for bait. When I was eleven or twelve I was a soft-shell-crab businessman; the delicious little creatures were so numerous in the mudflats of low tide that I could fill a market basket in less than an hour and then peddle these—layered with fragrant seaweed—at the back doors of the village houses, where the ladies grumbled at my exorbitant price: three cents apiece, an inflationary penny more than the previous year. I loved this big, fecund, blowsy, beautiful, erotic river. It was erotic, and I achieved with it a penultimate intimacy by nearly drowning in it in my thirteenth year, when the little boat in which I was learning to sail capsized and sank. Still, I loved the James, and in memory its summertime shores are tangled with all that piercing delight of youthful romance; recollecting the moonlight in huge quicksilver oblongs on those dark waters, and the drugstore perfume of gardenia, and boys’ and girls’ voices. I no longer wonder why the river had such a lasting effect on my spirit, becoming almost in itself a metaphor for the painful sweetness of life and its mystery.
[Excerpted from a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, May 23, 1980.]
Children of a Brief Sunshine
I f the accident of birth caused you to spend most of your early life, as I did, on what is known as the Virginia historic peninsula, you were apt to grow up with a ponderous sense of the American past. As a boy I was made constantly aware of the trinity of national shrines—Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg—which even then, in the 1930s, brought tourists flocking to that seventy-mile oblong of somnolent Tidewater lowland that juts southeastward from Richmond between two of the country's most venerable rivers, the York and the James. But at that age, proximity and familiarity breed, if not contempt, then a certain callow indifference, and I don't recall being at all thrilled by the greater part of my admittedly august surroundings.
Jamestown was merely a boring landing on the river, heavy with melancholy and ancient, illegible tombstones. Yorktown, for me, possessed no glamour, none of the allure of a world-class battleground on the order of Waterloo or Hastings, but was simply a river beach where we went to gorge ourselves on hot dogs and to swim in the soupy tidal water, thick with jellyfish. For some reason verging on the heretical, Colonial Williamsburg never captured my fancy; it seemed even then a place largely contrived and artificial, and it left me cold. But part of my spirit was always mysteriously drawn to the James River mansions. They spoke to me in a secret, exciting way thatother landmarks could never speak, and I still consider them among the state's truly captivating attractions.
Westover
and
Brandon. Shirley
and
Carter’s Grove
. There are other fine Colonial structures in the Tidewater, but these four remain the exemplars of the noble species of dwelling that the early planters built on the banks of the James, creating, from native brick and timber, likenesses of the country houses of England they had left behind, but in each case, out of some quirky genius, imparting to the whole an individuality that remains arrestingly American. The mansions have of course undergone much restoration since the mid-eighteenth century, when they were built. (William Byrd's Westover, perhaps the most splendid of the group, was badly mutilated by fire during the Civil War.) But one of the remarkable things about these houses is the way they have escaped the look of having been prettified by the embalmer's hand. Although they are linked in spirit by their obviously Georgian origins, part of the charm of each lies in its almost defiant distinctiveness—Shirley, with its absence of wings, having a lofty solidity, in contrast, say, to the dignified horizontal expansiveness of Brandon and its rectangular
[Excerpted from a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, May 23, 1980.]
Children of a Brief Sunshine
I f the accident of birth caused you to spend most of your early life, as I did, on what is known as the Virginia historic peninsula, you were apt to grow up with a ponderous sense of the American past. As a boy I was made constantly aware of the trinity of national shrines—Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg—which even then, in the 1930s, brought tourists flocking to that seventy-mile oblong of somnolent Tidewater lowland that juts southeastward from Richmond between two of the country's most venerable rivers, the York and the James. But at that age, proximity and familiarity breed, if not contempt, then a certain callow indifference, and I don't recall being at all thrilled by the greater part of my admittedly august surroundings.
Jamestown was merely a boring landing on the river, heavy with melancholy and ancient, illegible tombstones. Yorktown, for me, possessed no glamour, none of the allure of a world-class battleground on the order of Waterloo or Hastings, but was simply a river beach where we went to gorge ourselves on hot dogs and to swim in the soupy tidal water, thick with jellyfish. For some reason verging on the heretical, Colonial Williamsburg never captured my fancy; it seemed even then a place largely contrived and artificial, and it left me cold. But part of my spirit was always mysteriously drawn to the James River mansions. They spoke to me in a secret, exciting way thatother landmarks could never speak, and I still consider them among the state's truly captivating attractions.
Westover
and
Brandon. Shirley
and
Carter’s Grove
. There are other fine Colonial structures in the Tidewater, but these four remain the exemplars of the noble species of dwelling that the early planters built on the banks of the James, creating, from native brick and timber, likenesses of the country houses of England they had left behind, but in each case, out of some quirky genius, imparting to the whole an individuality that remains arrestingly American. The mansions have of course undergone much restoration since the mid-eighteenth century, when they were built. (William Byrd's Westover, perhaps the most splendid of the group, was badly mutilated by fire during the Civil War.) But one of the remarkable things about these houses is the way they have escaped the look of having been prettified by the embalmer's hand. Although they are linked in spirit by their obviously Georgian origins, part of the charm of each lies in its almost defiant distinctiveness—Shirley, with its absence of wings, having a lofty solidity, in contrast, say, to the dignified horizontal expansiveness of Brandon and its rectangular
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