Spanish moss (Beaufort, S. C.)
According to journalistic reports, the recently completed Murdaugh trial, ending in the conviction of a prominent South Carolina lawyer for a double murder, “transfixed the nation.” I was rather relieved to read that, because it offered me an increasingly rare opportunity to feel in synch with “the nation”. I spent more time than I ought to have done following the case. And having just read a banal and factually challenged account of the matter by an on-the-spot New Yorker journalist deemed an expert, I feel reasonably qualified to have my own opinions. But not to worry. I don’t intend to share many of them with you. I will share one. I believe that the endless puzzlement over the murderer’s motives will remain unresolved so long as one believes that a mind narcoticized for a decade by opiates is likely to produce generally comprehensible “motives.”
Much of the commentary in the northeastern press has had an anachronistic tinge to it, as though we were still in the Twenties (as in 1920s) and there were a particular grotesquerie to crime below the Mason and Dixon line. I’m enough of a southerner to resent this baloney. Never mind that the Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacey, and Ted Bundy, were not in fact good ole southern boys. Over the years I have happened to know some particularly fine South Carolinians. At the top of the list is one of our wonderful daughters-in-law, Melanie Dean. But the list includes many former students and other friends.
Indeed, one of the closest friends of my undergraduate years, DuPre Jones, was a native of Beaufort, where I visited several times over the years. Beaufort is probably the closest town of any size near the scene of the murders, and it was mentioned from time to time in the testimony. There are Beauforts in both of the Carolinas. (The point of finesse here, apparently, is in a distinction of pronunciation. The North Carolina Beaufort is Frenchier: BO-fort. The South Carolina one is BEW-furt.) At the time of my first visit we had both been reading a lot of Faulkner, and had recently shared an enthusiasm for Absalom! Absalom! That novel is perhaps not the apogee of Faulknerian Gothic, but DuPre assured me that it was good preparation for understanding the culture of his hometown. I thought the place was pretty cool. It provided my first encounter with Spanish moss in abundance. There’s a reason they call that part of the state the “low country”. About half of the land is under water, and the rest seems aspiring to be. The Marines at nearby Parris Island exploit this feature to train their recruits, drowning one now and again. Alligators! Quicksand! Chinese balloons!
DuPre died of cancer about ten years ago. I am sorry to say that we were not in frequent touch during his last two years. Friendship is sometimes described as an art. It can also be a duty which one can fulfill or neglect, and I fear I neglected this one at the end. I have a hundred excuses, none of them sufficient to assuage a guilty conscience. DuPre was a remarkable person who had a somewhat ragged life. He liked to apply to our group of friends the striking phrase in Shelley’s “Adonais,” his lament for Keats: “The inheritors of unfulfill'd renown.” That was perhaps a prescient self-diagnosis. He was witty, brilliant, sardonic. In his work life he was successively the librarian of the Washington Post and the New York Times—a newspaper librarian being crucial for researching articles, fact-checking, etc. He loved serious cinema and wrote about it eloquently. He is the author of an engaging pseudo-children’s book, The Adventures of Gremlin, which was illustrated by the famed Edward Gorey. A kind of pre-post-modern Candide, it is still sought after by connoisseurs. He was for a brief period the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature during one of the many failed efforts to revive that once illustrious journal. He was complicated, with a complex personal life. I knew both of his wives, and also one fairly long-term girlfriend, a Times reporter frequently by-lined for important stories on the front page. Lovely women all. But there was lots of other amatory drama in his private life of which I had only a vague awareness. There seemed to be a missing gene on that front, or maybe an extra gene. He got a very respectful obituary from a colleague working for his one-time employer, the New York Times, and someone qualified to appreciate the very high quality of his rare professional skills. By now I am inured to the death of old friends, but Pre was one of the first to disappear, and the special sadness still remains.
The Murdaugh trial raised all sorts of things in my mind. The crimes for which Murdaugh was convicted, and I suppose I must believe justly convicted, challenge one’s concept of human personality. Sociological and pharmacological commentaries do not get me much nearer to what St. Paul called “the mystery of iniquity”. In In Memoriam Tennyson wrote, “Oh yet we trust that somehow good/Will be the final goal of ill…”, possibly the silliest lines of a great poet who wrote too many of them. But still….I now face a difficult transition in this essay because the chain Murdaugh, Beaufort, DuPre leads to a nice little episode, still in development, involving some members of the Jones family. I suddenly felt the desire, even need, to write some kind of brief, decade-late and inadequate memorial of my friend, and to inform such surviving close relatives as I was aware of where they might read it. However, many people, such as most sensible ones, do not like to have their names spread across the Internet in random fashion, even in friendly reports on obscure blogs; so I must speak obliquely. I don’t want them being chased down by random Reddit sleuths. Of course, I am sure they have no difficulty with queries that begin, “Hi! You don’t know me, but I just wasted untold hours watching the trial of a psychopathic murderer and so felt the need to track down ‘Ardet’ Jones asap”. Ordinarily I would regard the name Jones safe from the generally feeble abilities of the Redditeers on account of the overwhelming number of Joneses. I had first thought of contacting DuPre’s elder brother, supposing him to be extant. But this man, whom I think I once met in passing but do not know at all, has a given name so unusual that I wrongly believed it to be unique. So in this short tale I assign to him the wholly manufactured monicker of “Ardet”, which has about the same level of plausibility as the actual name. I was then intending to move on to his younger brother, a retired priest of reportedly notable abilities and joie de vivre. There are ten thousand Tom, Dick, and Harry Joneses in America, but apparently only two actual “Ardet” Jones in the Internet world—one of them a house-building company in Cheshire, England. I do very slightly know DuPre’s younger brother, the retired priest and one of the 20,600 LinkedIn Michael Joneses, and the next on the list.
Of the coded American listings for “Ardet” Jones there are only two, and since they are of the same person, you might as well say one. But he appeared to be about the age of one of our own sons. Ah, thought I, the son of the man I seek. But no. He’s the nephew of that guy, and the son of the aforementioned cleric. Furthermore, he is a fellow alumnus of Sewanee and a teacher of English and American literature with an advanced degree from an institution at which I used to teach. Degrees of separation dropped like flies. He is now the headmaster of one of our distinguished cathedral schools. My email inquiry to him (the headmaster) led to one from Fr. Jones to me, confirming that he (Jones the priest) was indeed the cadet brother of one “Ardet” Jones, still alive and frisky at a great age in a retirement community, and the father of another (the English teacher.) He (Jones the priest) generously promised to send me his novel, Dear Old Town, based I believe in a true crime event in Beaufort (the town) in the 1950s. I am sure you are dazzled by my skill at describing complex matters with such pellucid clarity. A lesser writer, Dickens say, would have you thoroughly confused by now. These very pleasant developments may not wholly vindicate Tennyson; but they are surely good things that come in the aftermath of some perfectly terrible ones with which they have only vague geographical relation.
