Berendtesque ... Savannah, Georgia in the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (starring Kevin Spacey)
I've just returned from a brief holiday in Savannah, Georgia, a few pounds heavier around the waist, a few pounds lighter in the wallet and my head crammed with gorgeous images. It's just as John Berendt describes it in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. There are sleepy squares shaded by oak trees draping Spanish moss. There are delightful splashes of colour from azalea bushes next to dark mysterious streets. The diners are bustling, bright with chrome and the talk in them is as fast and peppery as the food.
In fact, the place was so like Berendt's evocative descriptions that it occasionally felt like I'd been there before. Or as if the whole town had been recreated in the image the author created. The only major difference between Savannah as he described it and Savannah now was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil itself. "The Book", as locals call it, now seems to dominate all aspects of life in this seductive Southern city.
Every other shop sells "Book"-related paraphernalia (from the paper artefact itself right up to three-foot scale models of the famous Bird Girl cover image, via a bewildering variety of t-shirts), every corner of the famous old quarter offers a photo opportunity for the thousands of "Book" obsessed tourists, and the roads crawl with tour buses offering blow-by-blow accounts of the real-life events Berendt describes.
In a sense, it's a happy relationship. "The Book" has clearly brought in millions of dollars of tourist money, plenty of its protagonists have retired early on the proceeds, and more of Savannah's beautiful buildings have been preserved as a result.
All the same, it's hard not to feel like something's been lost. Perhaps it's unwise to hope for an "authentic experience" anywhere, but Savannah especially feels like a secondhand city; a pastiche of itself put on for the benefit of throngs of bum-bag bearing Midwesterners.
At times it felt more like a murder theme park than a living breathing community. Even in death, meanwhile, the locals can't escape Berendt's influence. The oak-lined avenues of the huge Bonaventure Cemetery are thronged daily with tourists wanting to see the site of the famous Bird Girl statue and snap photos of themselves re-enacting a scene in the book by drinking Martinis on the bench that marks Conrad Aiken's grave.
The ambiguity of this relationship with Berendt's essentially unhappy story was brought home to me most sharply when I went on a tour of The Mercer House. This stately 19th-century townhouse was painstakingly restored by the internationally renowned antiques dealer Jim Williams in the 1970s and 80s and is a showpiece of Old South architecture. It's also the place where Williams shot his lover and so sparked off the investigation that forms the basis of Berendt's narrative.
Even though everyone on the tour (myself included) was clearly there to gawp at the scene of the killing, the tour focused entirely on the antique collection and the work Williams had done on the interior decoration. The only mention our guide gave of any unseemly events came in the brief (prim) remark, thrown in after a long dull excursus on a chest of drawers: "In case you're wandering, this is the room where 'the incident' occurred."
In a sense, it was hard not to feel cheated. The main reason I'd parted with my hard-earned cash was to better picture "the incident", rather than find out about some rather gaudy antiques. Even so, I had to respect the guide's delicacy, not least because Jim Williams' survivors still occupy the house and are generally on the upper floor when the tours take place.
I left feeling half ashamed at failing to properly grasp how real - and raw - the story of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil still is to plenty of living people. Equally, I was amazed at how much the book has changed the reality of the town. The only places I can think of that a writer has made such a marked imprint on were Stratford-upon-Avon and the goth-thronged streets of Whitby. If nothing else, it's a remarkable legacy.
