Cover Story: Finalist: The Death of the Venus' Flytrap

My daughter whined for it in the Palmetto Gardens gift shop, pointing a slightly quivering finger to where it stood on a glass shelf between Bible bookmarks and polished rock desk sets. Customers turned to look, and my wife tried to cringe into invisibility. We were on vacation, exploring the South Carolina coast from Charleston to Myrtle Beach, when we saw a billboard on Highway 17 announcing "The Largest Sculpture Garden in the U.S." In America it's the largest or it's nothing at all, and the billboard was red, white and blue. How can you beat a country like this?

But I fancied myself something of a connoisseur of the arts, mainly because I'd spent most of my life and much of my bookstore's profits — often to my wife's furious chagrin — building a modest collection of modern American prints, mostly from the first quarter of the century: the Ashcan School, Stieglitz and his Gallery 291 crowd, and the Precisionists — America's Futurists — who celebrated industry, speed and technology. Once I had to get a second mortgage on the store to buy a George Luks monotype of a Greenwich Village street scene. For me art is life, and I can't imagine a meaningful existence without it. My wife only talked about limits and Freud's reality principle. She's never been impulsive, but she says it's because of me.

So with my aesthetic beliefs and needs, I figured that something as big as what the billboard promised shouldn't be missed. I turned onto an avenue lined with large oaks draped with Spanish moss leading to an intricate wrought iron gate depicting swans drifting among water lilies. Ten bucks later we were inside, rolling slowly along the grand entrance driveway, passing between more gigantic oaks through which shown sun-drenched vistas of cool groomed grass.

According to the historical background sign outside, the gardens, comprising some 5,000 acres, had been fashioned in the '50s on the grounds of an old rice and indigo plantation carved out of cypress swamp in 1704, where the last scion of a venerable Lowcountry family decided to do something different with the largely neglected plantation. During the '30s he began to acquire as much contemporary sculpture in metal and stone as he could find, which was relatively easy and inexpensive thanks to the Depression. Artists were lining up outside the Greek Revival semi-temple of a home just to exhibit and explain their creations. He passed judgment on them then and there, but he'd let their creators stay the night if it was too late, and give them a good meal with wine. Art market communication being what it is, every artist in a five-hundred-mile radius knew who he was, with some becoming sculptors almost overnight.

With hundreds of sculptures in his possession by the end of World War II, ranging from small bronze figurines of nymphs and satyrs, to epic marble pieces weighing tons, he began to convert what was left of the rice paddies to elaborate formal gardens as the environment for his collection, the works to be situated among fountains, reflecting pools, a tropical greenhouse (for the smaller items), arbors, and beds upon beds of flowers, elegant trees and freshly-shaped shrubs, sometimes in topiary and intricate mazes. Because he wanted the botany of the experience on an equal footing with the art, everything vegetable and mineral had a brass label, even on the ground to tell you what kind of grass grew there.

As a botany lesson it was appealing, but as art it was conventional and painfully middlebrow, just what our tourists love. Yes, I am a snob, but not in a mean-spirited way.

Some art is just better than others, and there's pleasure in discerning that difference. In fact, the better you are at perceiving that difference, the better you are as a human being. It is a corollary of the aesthetic experience, if that experience is defined as an embodiment, a showing forth of the Good, as Plato held.

The collection was drawn from the mainstream of American sculpture done between the turn of the century and World War II, but, with the exception of a few pieces that seemed vaguely art nouveau and deco, the dominant popular styles of the period, it displayed virtually no evidence of the modernist eruption in Europe, not even a hint of the primitive mask, the sliced geometry of cubism, or the surreal images of the slithering unconscious. In fact, to judge from this epic assemblage of bronze and stone animals and heroic figures from Greco-Roman mythology, modern art had never happened at all.

It pissed me off at first, thinking how unrepresentative and misleading it all was and how symptomatic it was of everything I hate about America. But overall it was just plain boring, which, to adopt Wilde's decadent aesthetic, is the worst sin that any art can commit. This was truly art for the masses, though, many of whom had arrived in pickup trucks, zany T-shirts and flip-flops, showing interest only in what happened to be nude or big or both. As an elitist snob, I believe that art affects and edifies everybody but that only a small minority are able to understand their aesthetic experience and discriminate among its different kinds. I was an initiate, they weren't, and I resented having to rub elbows with them in the illusion of equality.

And it was hot. My daughter was 7 then, and the long humid trek beneath July sun tried her young patience. Art was one of those enigmatic adult distractions, to be endured only so long as she was pampered and rewarded. She wanted the beach, a swimming pool, carnival rides or miniature golf, and she knew that there was plenty of all of that back in Myrtle Beach, where we were staying in a Ramada Inn on the beach.

But in the air-conditioning of the gift shop the plant drew her to it. It had been grown in the tropical greenhouse, along with other exotics for sale. Its several mouths, insides an enticing tropical pink blush, were open for prey, waiting to fold shut on small things made of meat. It was horror, and she wanted to bring it home.

I didn't want her to have it. After all, I was hot, too, and I didn't like the omnivorous nature "red in tooth and claw" that thing represented. They see enough of that on nature shows on TV. An afternoon of bad art had made me mean and mad at myself for being suckered in by a sign. It was also expensive and certain to die as soon as we got it home, further evidence of a foolish tourist trapped, and so primal, so much the stuff of nightmares it made me anxious. There was a beautiful little book of Georgia O'Keefe's floral paintings that I wanted her to have instead so she could commence cultivating her aesthetic sensibility. They're never too young for that.

She whined while I remonstrated until her mother arrived from the post card racks to settle our escalating confrontation by buying her the plant while offering me an evening in Sodom when our trip was over. Daughter and father were thus easily pacified by the calm ministrations of mother, wife and whore, who shooed us back to the car, so she could smoke a joint alone while contemplating the poolside reflection of a titanic Bellerophon astride a rearing Pegasus.

The remainder of the vacation passed pleasantly and uneventfully: mini-golf, beach, shops, seafood and TV in the Ramada at night. Myrtle Beach is the principal redneck resort of choice on South Carolina's Grand Strand — the East Coast counterpart of the so-called Redneck Riviera on Florida's panhandle — mainly because it offered economical accommodations and lots of cheap stuff to do, a place where teenagers can run sexually amok via their ubiquitous hormonal subculture, the end result of how they gravitate towards each other in public spaces. Otherwise it's beer, burgers and carnival sweets and games. On the weekends the Chamber of Commerce tries to recapture the way it was in the late '50s, the '60s and early '70s when Fats Domino, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts (with their female counterparts, the Cherries), Bo Didley, the Temptations, the Tams and the Drifters played dances on the beach's huge wooden pier. And just like then, the young people get drunk, puke and pass out in public, sometimes getting together to sing and move as a mob, harassing middle-aged tourists until the police arrive. During Spring Break, when college hordes are unleashed on small beachside communities, things sometimes get even more out of hand. Basically it's all about anarchy's siren call, never ideas, only instincts, compulsions, just being young and bursting with desire, as I was just thinking about it. I always get this way at the beach.

My daughter and I rode all of the four monster roller coasters there, with my wife opting out as she usually does because, she says, with two abreast it's not really an experience for three. The Python was the most extreme. With riders hanging suspended from a harness, the ride coiled around a central tube with enough spiral speed and force to kill you if anything went wrong. My wife always remembers the tragedies, sometimes even quoting headlines. But the two of us were hysterical together, reduced to breathless laughter and bodily excitement, savoring and sharing the physicality of our being, the precariousness of our motley lives.

My wife and I had been getting on much better since we gave up trying to change each other, no longer caring enough to engage in meaningful domestic strife. We had a history, of course, from desultory affairs to substance abuse, so many tawdry, tacky stories that give credence to original sin. But we've given each other the impression that we're mutually and pleasantly tolerant for the foreseeable future. Maybe it's because we're just getting old, fully acclimated to each other and addicted to a certain standard of living. We had a good time in Myrtle Beach, eating shrimp and crab and shopping for antiques. At least that's what I thought.

The plant did manage to survive the journey to its new home in the Atlanta suburbs, although we almost lost it at an I-20 rest stop near Augusta, when my daughter dropped it on the sidewalk while insisting that it get fresh air. The clay pot it came in shattered, but I found a paper cup at the Coke machine to replace it. I had to add a little local soil, mostly that Georgia red clay, but my wife wetted it down well and held it in her lap the rest of the way.

She cleared a shelf for it in a bay window facing west, a room controlled by a dominant Marsden Hartley serigraph of a Maine seascape and two minor dry-point etchings of city storefronts by John Marin, the core of my collection and hopefully worth more than the third mortgage they had cost me. Although I knew that it had been grown in a greenhouse, I told my daughter that it was probably fresh from a deadly swamp, something dinosaurs would have eaten.

She wouldn't buy it. There was even a nascent self in the sound of her voice.

"I saw them growing in the greenhouse, Daddy." She made an omniscient face, glowing in self-righteousness. I saw she was a part of my potential in history, that I would still go one for awhile. Why was that a consolation?

"So what?" I said, my standard rebuttal when I had nothing left to say because I was stupid enough to have said anything in the first place.

It wasn't long before it became the indoor pet our family had never had. It seemed like we wanted something that would distract us from one another. We kept it moist in distilled water like the directions said, and checked every day to see the closed mouth pods telling us that insects were being digested. For a time it even appeared to grow.

But we wanted more.

Then it became a reason for living. I would think about it, fantasize about it, imagine what it might be like if it got everything it needed and more. I started swatting gnats and flies outside so I could feed them to the plant and watch delighted as the mouths folded over them. My daughter did the same with tiny bits of hamburger. Together we must have fed the plant to death, for soon the pods started turning soggy black and dropping off. My wife, who had warned us all along and who always knew what to do, tried to save it with quarantine and intensive care, but it was too late. After three days, it was as if the plant had disappeared, leaving behind only the barest trace of a stringy blackened stalk.

Its absence was a presence for awhile. We started quarreling about who was to blame; there were ample reasons all around. It said a lot about how we were then and, later, why. We had wanted more than nature, and now we had nothing. I wish I'd learned that lesson before the divorce six months later, when neither life nor art could change anything.

Lucas Carpenter is a widely published writer and professor of English at Emory University's Oxford College. He lives in Conyers with his wife Judy and his daughter Meredith.

For more winning stories, click a title below:

First-place winner: [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-01-01/cover2.html|Mysterium tremendum
?Second-place winner: [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-01-01/cover3.html|The kid who ate paste
?Third place winner: [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-01-01/cover4.html|Dixie youth
?Finalist: [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-01-01/cover6.html|Please read!
?Finalist: [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-01-01/cover7.html|Between brick and drywall
?Finalist: Behaving ourselves
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