Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a quirky book with quirky characters and quirky events. Some of it sounds like fiction but I am told that it is all true. For the sake of discussion, let us say it is nonfiction as claimed. This would then be a case where “Truth is stranger than fiction.” A 1997 interview on Booknotes on C-Span shows author John Berendt to be almost as quirky as his book. He is entertaining and delightful to watch and listen to. If you want to treat yourself, go to http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/89415-... . At that time the book had been on the NY Times best seller list for over 160 weeks on its way to 216. And if quirky doesn’t quite seem like the right descriptor, try eccentric. Berendt took seven years to research and write this book. It is loaded with information about Savannah, Georgia, plus a fascinating story. If you can read the following paragraph without smiling just a little, you probably won’t like this book. Luther says “I’ve got too much Savannah in me, I guess. My family’s been here seven generations, and after that long a time I suppose it gets into your genes. It’s like the control insects at the laboratory. Did I ever tell you about them? Well, we keep a lot of insect colonies in big glass jars out there. Some of them have been breeding for twenty-five years. That’s a thousand generations. All they know about life is what goes on inside their jar. They haven’t been exposed to pesticides or pollution, so they haven’t developed immunities or evolved in any way. They stay the same, generation after generation. If we released them into the outside world, they’d die. I think something like that happens after seven generations in Savannah. Savannah gets to be the only place you can live. We’re like the bugs in a jar.” The book is filled with many possible but only some likely events, details about people, especially rich people, that seem at least cause for embarrassment if not lawsuits. When he was living out at Foot Point Plantation, he’d invite people for Sunday lunch and tell them, “Now, be sure to arrive by noon.” And he meant it. At quarter to twelve, he’d take a drink and his rifle and climb into a tree, where he could watch his guests coming up the long driveway. At the stroke of noon, he’d take aim through the telescopic sights and shoot the hood ornaments off the cars of the latecomers, just to let them know they were late.” I am sure that the veracity of this book has been talked and written about extensively so I will only offer my uneducated opinion. Everything in this book could not be true so it should rightly be called historical fiction. After all, if you had to pick between true and humorous, wouldn’t you pick humorous? It is clear that John Berendt did. And, considering the best selling stature of the book, he made the right choice.You get a clue that Berendt has a good relationship with the funny bone when you discover he was on the staff of The Harvard Lampoon while he was an undergraduate English major. His humor skills were employed to their best advantage in Midnight: some subtle, some raucous and some ribald but all enjoyable.I enjoyed reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as have many of my GR friends. The book has been a success as evidenced by the fact that it sold over 2.7 million hardcovers. Although the book is going on twenty years since publication, it doesn’t seem at all dated.This is one of the many books that I might not have ever read or heard of without GoodReads. I was evidently focused on something else when it was on the NYT best seller list for over four years. I have had the book on my shelf for a while. What finally got me to read it was that it was chosen as one of the monthly reads for the GR group On the Southern Literary Trail. Check out that group at http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6....I found it easy to give this book four stars. Many times I wanted to keep on reading without stopping. It is fun to occasionally run into a book that keeps me turning the pages. Sometimes I feel obligated to finish a book once I start it. That was not a problem here.
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is ostensibly about the macabre truths that lie behind Savannah's gentile facade. As you might expect, these are of a distinctly Gothic nature. Imagine a travel guide written by Tennessee Williams. We are invited to marvel at some familiar grotesques: the homosexual in a smoking jacket, the socialite drunk at noon, the young hustler with a Red Camaro, the outrageous trannie, the witch doctor. All of this is presented with a light touch, even as the parade of anecdotes transitions to an expose of a celebrated murder case. It makes for a fun read, and it's easy to see why this book reinvented the Savannah tourist scene and stayed on the best seller list for five straight years. But as with Capote's "In Cold Blood", it's interesting to explore exactly where this memoir diverges from the truth- what lies hidden behind the narrator's engaging facade? Berendt comes across as a good-natured everyman, a writer newly settled in town, just taking a look around. Of course, he was a good deal more than that: the famous ex-editor of New York Magazine, and more importantly, perhaps, a gay man. This background explains his easy entree into the life of Jim Williams, the anti-hero of the book. Rich, handsome, secretive, and gay- a man not too dissimilar from the narrator: He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning sliver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you couldn't see in. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings and large, well-proportioned rooms. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. There was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah's great houses still in private hands. Together with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied an entire city block. If Mercer House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished.Much has been written about Berendt's many elisions and emendations of the strict truth: the way he rearranged the timeline of the murder at the center of the book to narrate it in the first person, the "degaying" of the murder victim, the changing of names and invention of composite characters. This is all worth thinking about, but I'm more interested in a different class of distortions: what hidden biases does a rich, gay northerner bring to a description of the South?First, there is the previously mentioned delight in the grotesque. This is a tendency of all northern authors to reduce people in the South to types. Berendt does some of this, and while the reduction makes for good story-telling, you can't help but wonder what kind of truth it leaves out of the picture. Second, as a white northerner, the author has little access to the Black culture of the city- and apart from a short chapter about a Black cotillion, the only Black faces we see in the story are trannies, witch doctors, and servants. This probably misses some deeper truths about the city. Finally, as a wealthy gay man, Berendt's sympathies seem clearly biased towards Jim Williams, with whom he shares more than a little in common (Berendt currently lives in a mansion on the Upper West Side decked out not-too-different than Williams' house in Savannah.) How does this change his story? I'm not sure- but it would probably be better if he addressed it himself when he was writing it.So what are we to make of all of this? Capote's "In Cold Blood", despite its flaws and half-truths, told a profound story of human nature and the depths to which people can sink. "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" tells an entertaining story about the degree to which you can beat a murder rap if you have a house filled with a couple of million dollars worth of antiques. That doesn't mean it's not worth your time: it's just not as important a book as its fame would suggest.
What do You think about Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story (1999)?
Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.
—Tabby Kat
Just arrived from Finland through BM.What a pity this book ended. I must find a way to visit this beautiful city of Savannah. The story is about the trial of Jim Williams, a Savannah's socialite and an international antiques dealer, crazy by the famous Faberge eggs, which was accused of the murder of Danny Handsford. After had discovered that a super-saver fare to Savannah cost the same as an entree in a Manhattan restaurant, the author spent eight years fitting between these two cities. In this way, his travelogue is intertwined with Williams' story that have been tried four times in a middle of a legal battle. A remarkable piece of work by John Berendt and I am looking forward to read more books by this author. Below, some wonderful houses in the Victorian District in Savannah: Williams’ Mercer house, Lee and Emma Adler House and The Hamilton-Turner house mentioned to this book. But what about the Bird Girl Statue? According to Wikipedia, "only four statues were made from the original plaster cast. The first went to the Massachusetts garden. The second was sent to Washington, D.C., and is now located in Reading, Pennsylvania. The third was purchased by a family in Lake Forest and has never relocated. The fourth and most famous statue was bought by a family in Savannah, Georgia, who named it Little Wendy and set it up at her family's plot in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia."A film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in 1997, directed by Clint Eastwood, where Kevin Spacey played the role of Jim Williams.
—Laura
John Berendt's well-known (non-)fiction work is the story of a murder. But it really isn't, it is actually more of a masterfully told story about a number of people in Savannah and the place itself. I just love this author's narrative and the first time I read the book I did it in a couple of long sittings, due to the fact that I couldn't bring myself to put it down. If you for some reason would not want to invest the time in this book, watch the great (and sadly underrated) movie! Then read the book.
—Thomas Strömquist
