The State with the Prettiest Name

Abstract

Those pioneer hopes, homage stained with arrogance or contempt, the names of our states have long since lost the furtive tang of accident. They have become what they never could be at first, inevitable. Think how many pay dubious respect to the tribes slaughtered, driven off, forced onto agencies (as reservations once were called), or who, having no immunity against smallpox or measles, did not survive the encounter with trapper or trader: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, with perhaps fifteen more taken from Indian words. Think of the names that courted the favor of kings or queens (Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana), or acknowledged a founder's father (Pennsylvania) or a founding father (Washington). As soon as a thing is named, it begins to acquire associations that divide it from what it was named for. Who thinks now of Hampshire, Jersey, or York? Of all these, can "Florida" really be the prettiest? If so, it will always be so, no matter how overrun with shopping malls and pasteboard houses it becomes. Elizabeth Bishop's was the Florida of the late thirties, though-undeveloped, larval, not yet emerging from the 1925 crash of the land boom (which ruined John Berryman's father). This was the South beyond the South, a land with an atmosphere no less seductive than the gauzy, hand-colored views of Egypt, Samarkand, or Japan, all places once of Western reverie and bemusement. Depression Florida was still in touch with the days when Henry Plagier, one of the founders of Standard oil, reorganized and extended the state's east-coast rail lines, having already started to build his giant mirage-like hotels, the Disney Worlds of their day. During his America tour in 1904-1905, Henry James felt he had to see that peninsula of the "velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism." He stayed, almost as a matter of course, at Flagler's Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine. This grandiose example of "Moorish" architecture, filled with Tiffany glass, was otherwise as up-to-date as the poured concrete it was made from. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts trained south in private railway cars, when Florida was the winter destination of those who summered in Newport or beside Long Island Sound ( The Age of Innocence has its St. Augustine scenes). Henry Plant, another railroad baron, built a verandah onto his Tampa Bay hotel more majestic than the Grand Union's more famous one in Saratoga. Plant's Moorish extravaganza saw, in its heyday, performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, and Anna Pavlova. Surrounding everything was that air of strangeness, of otherness, of things newly seen and yet always known, a place slightly hostile to human presence. Normally the most buttoned-up of writers, James comically grasped after adequate images: "I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe." The flora's oddity, its vacant and humid sulkiness, its erotic silkiness, had fascinated and appalled the first explorers. Elizabeth Bishop might have understood: The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots that bear while living oysters in clusters, and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons, dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass. ("Florida") Portraits of Florida, its beauty almost too beautiful, often risk a shallow, shoreline prettiness, the preciousness of the postcard, whose penny purpose is always to incite a twinge of jealousy. …