The Palm at the End of the Mind

Visions of Key West

All images from Tarpon (1973)

Florida—America’s problem child, God’s waiting room—hangs down at the bottom of the Eastern Seaboard, priapic and slightly obscene. Through its lands and waters roam alligators, manatees, flamingoes, iguanas, and all manner of colorful characters: hustlers, tricksters, exiles, swamp dwellers, and RVers, as if the country were tipped forty-five degrees to the right, and all the pure products of America, who had nothing to hang onto, wound up there. Like Texas or California or Louisiana, it’s a country within a country. An invisible republic, whose presence hangs heavy in the air.

Perhaps at some later date we’ll turn our eyes to the cultural and artistic output of Florida’s mainland, to Tampa or Their Eyes Were Watching God or Annihilation or Spring Breakers or the great tradition of the Miami crime novel. But for now I want to point our car south through the monotonous green tunnels of I-95 or Florida’s Turnpike and watch the magnolias and live oaks turn into seagrapes and bald cypresses until we come to the very edge of the continental United States. And to keep driving, off the edge, out into nowhere, until we hit Key West.

---

Despite never having actually made it there during the year of my life I spent wasting away in the Florida Panhandle, I’ve always been somewhat enamored of Key West. Its actual physical manifestation might be a wholly unaffordable tourist trap choked with retirees and spring breakers, but my mental picture of it still whispers of the half-legendary pirate utopia, of Hispaniola or Libertalia, of the feeling I got reading about Jean Lafitte and Captain Kidd in my youth, and reading Hakim Bey and William Burroughs as a teenager. I swoon at the idea of the very end of America, a haven for eccentrics, rogues, smugglers, and ne’er-do-wells of all types.

My interest further increased when I discovered the grotty crew of writers that made their home there. Hemingway, of course, whose ghost hovers over the place and whose six-toed cats roam through it, and Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop and Hunter S. Thompson, but most enticingly a group of refugees from the collapse of the counterculture, who washed up in Key West after various personal and professional failures, seeking somewhere to write, fish, and generally dissolve into the surf: sad, strange, childlike Richard Brautigan, the affable Michigan gourmand Jim Harrison, and the ringleader of this crew, Thomas McGuane.

Of those three, it’s McGuane whose work dealt most directly with the island, in two novels, Ninety-Two in the Shade and Panama, both of which deal with a half-cracked holy fool returning to Key West and finding trouble. In the former, it’s Tom Skelton, a fishing guide who finds himself pulled into a deadly rivalry with a more established practitioner of the trade, and in the latter it’s Chester Pomeroy, a former rock star given to lurid and extravagant romantic gestures, dealing with the wreckage of his relationships with his father and ex-girlfriend.

I enjoyed both of these books and recommend them if you’re in the mood for their particular brand of sunstroke prose, but I did find myself alternating between enchantment and frustration in a particularly jarring manner. As Jonathan Lethem once said of Norman Mailer, some writers are inconsistent book to book, he’s inconsistent paragraph to paragraph. McGuane is going for broke all the time trying to communicate the frazzled state of his protagonist, which means he never uses a straightforward description when an off-kilter one will do. A two-page stretch of Ninety-Two in the Shade finds flowers in a “delicately emblematic subdivision of light,” a bouncing bed giving a “rachitic sprung utterance,” and a window letting in a “pure convexity of luminous air” and “a bar of fluorescing sun,” all of which causes the protagonist to consider that “The chrysalis he sometimes felt inside was beginning to shed and stream quite lambently.” As a partisan of exuberant language, I endorse the attempt, but too much of this can start to feel like a big pile of whipped cream on a small slice of key lime pie. Perhaps it’s a personal thing: that brand of rootin’ tootin’ Vintage Contemporaries flowery masculinism that I go absolutely crazy for in its cinematic and musical variants can sometimes let me down in an obscure way in a novel; there can be something a little precious in it, a little bit overcompensatory, a little bit of an odd note in all these stories about junkies and cowboys and grizzled fishing guides whose free indirect discourse reads like Moses Herzog.

But just when you start to get a bit sick of this overwhipped meringue, he’ll hit you with something really good, like the below paragraph, which comes just after all the tortured descriptions I just quoted.

When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that’s what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. The shining city will beckon in the distance. The shadow of the Bakunin monument will not quite stretch to my door. In the evening the sound of happy syndicalist badminton finals will be borne to me on a sweet wind that sours as it enters my slum. I will behave poorly.

That’s true weirdness, and true brilliance, the communiqué of a fried mind that doesn’t lean on a haze of hey-i’m-writing-here descriptions for effect. And make no mistake, these are two of the most deeply fried novels I’ve ever read in my life; edges curling up and the yolk all but set. In some stretches it can be difficult to tell what exactly is going on, especially in Panama, which starts to feel like The Golden Bowl in a Hawaiian shirt. I would read them in the morning before work and feel woozy, as if I had been baking in the harsh sunlight for hours, all day.

---

McGuane’s adventures with his convivial crew of freaks was captured in the documentary Tarpon, an hour-long, immaculately vibed hangout movie that alternates scenes of bohemian merrymaking and kibitzing with long, slow, meditative scenes of fishing out on the flats for the titular creatures, who upon being hooked launch themselves out of the water, writhing and wriggling spectacularly. To watch the recent 4K restoration of Tarpon is to be convinced that the Keys in the 1970s were the most gorgeous place on earth. The film is saturated with shades of blue—the azure bay, the sparkling turquoise flats, the blindingly clear sky—that serve, like the great Impressionists, to remind you just how many variations of color exist in the world. Watching it on even a halfway decent TV gives it at once the slightly unreal fuzz of 35mm film and a sharpness and clarity that one imagines not even the filmmakers experienced, and all this natural sublimity combined with the toytown world of tourist stands and sailors’ bars on the island gives the film as a whole the quality of a strange and delicious dream, an impermanent, hazy pleasure, like a long afternoon nap in the sun.

No Eden ever lasts, though, and a few scenes in Tarpon purposely contrast the utter beauty and serenity of the flats with the ever-present forces of American greed and darkness, most notably in a brief interview with a shark-eyed barfly who brags about his experiences doing God-knows-what during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and an excruciating scene of a tourist charter chumming the water for sharks, hauling them onto the deck, and letting mainlanders with bovine grins take turns whacking them to death. Souvenir pictures of them with their gruesome prizes are sold on shore for seventy-five cents each.

This element of disquiet makes Tarpon a great film and not just a particularly well-made advertisement for the Florida Tourism Council. The uncomfortable thought arises that the shark-whackers and James Ellroy side characters are the true face of the island, and the chivalric and honorable tarpon fishers, who release their opponents after defeating them, are kidding themselves, upholding a tradition that never existed or was a simple fig leaf for strip-mining the island paradise of all its charms and selling it back to tourists. But these questions only lurk in the background, and most of Tarpon is a hymn to the good life; like The Big Lebowski or The Beach Bum (for which it was almost certainly an influence) a portrait of chilling out as a high-level artistic practice. It’s all helped along, by the way, by the superbly atmospheric instrumental soundtrack courtesy of McGuane’s brother-in-law, a young musician on the make by the name of Jimmy Buffett.

---

Ah, Jimmy. Ever since I discovered that Jimmy Buffett was introduced to Key West by the great country singer Jerry Jeff Walker, and subsequently spent years palling around with McGuane’s righteous band of weirdos and playing for free beer in dockside dives, I’ve been fascinated by the man, who I had written off as nothing more than a cynical purveyor of empty-headed good-time music for alcoholic boomers. Who was he below the persona? Did he ever regret trading in his artistic integrity for billions of dollars worth of chain restaurants, hotels, retail stores and casinos? Was he a wannabe Dylan who took the commercial path when the artistic one didn’t shake out, or a cold striver the whole time?

It would really fit my narrative to say that his first few records, before “Margaritaville” sent him on the path to stardom, are unlikely 70s singer-songwriter classics and that he sold his soul in order to sell America a mass-produced vision of the beach-bum lifestyle, but that’s not quite the case. There’s a lot of talent there and a few genuinely really good songs—the gorgeous, downcast “A Pirate Looks at Forty” stands up to anything on On the Beach or If I Could Only Remember My Name—but the records are marred by a reedy smugness and a too-broad sense of humor. Perhaps it’s because it’s impossible to hear them with fresh ears and no knowledge of his subsequent ventures, but one detects a hint of the false smile of the American businessman, the Ray Kroc type. Buffett’s midwestern contemporary, John Prine, employs a similar Prairie Home Companion register and nasally tone, but his complex and heartfelt genius and unabashed sincerity and empathy prevents him from falling into kitsch. Buffett is just a bit too pleased with himself and a bit too calculating to successfully walk that line.

Would you believe me, though, if I said that his short story collection Tales From Margaritaville is lowkey kind of good? There are immaculately credentialed collections coming out on FSG and Picador this month that I guarantee are worse. His writing is straightforward, a touch flat, but enthusiastic and creative, with an evident love for Mark Twain and Hemingway and Steinbeck and the rest of the American tradition of good-hearted adventure fiction. His subjects are simple little moral fables and picaresques about cowboys, road trips, football teams, diner waitresses, and other stock figures, none of which bother too much with a plot, content to revel in the vibes. The whole thing goes down easily and pleasantly, like a few episodes of a cheerful sitcom. Clearly knowing McGuane, Harrison and company rubbed off on him; it really isn’t half bad at all and would be an amiable companion on the beach or with a few tropical drinks.

Once again, though, the smarm can get in the way. Nearly every story in Tales From Margaritaville, as well as many lines in his early records, has a moment of uptight, I-was-here-first complaining about obnoxious tourists, or has as its villain rapacious commercializers and developers, trying to cramp the style of our laid-back, rascally heroes. In the first story, a Mark Twain-loving cowboy visits his hero’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, only to find “The Mark Twain Home and Museum, the Mark Twain Village Shoppes, the Twainland Express Depot, the Mark Twain Motor Inn, the Tom Sawyer Diorama, and the Huck Finn Shopping Center.” I hardly have to mention the irony here: that the author, already subject of a fervent cult following, would soon establish the Margaritaville restaurant chain, the Margaritaville Hotel and Casino, the widely reviled Broadway musical Escape to Margaritaville, the Margaritaville at Sea Paradise cruise ship, and Latitude Margaritaville, three “active retirement communities” for those “55 and better” who want to “live the Margaritaville lifestyle every day.”¹ I find this all a bit insulting: you find yourself part of a strange and wonderful moment in time, you grouse about all the people ruining it, and then you resolve to get a piece of the action yourself and sell the tropical lifestyle to harried midwesterners living lives of quiet desperation.

But I can’t dislike him in the end. Everyone likes boats and beaches and drinking and playing music, and he happened to be the one who managed to make millions doing it, capturing the sound and outlook of a slice of America—the Gulf Coast and environs—whose way of life had not yet to that point been entirely wrapped up and individually packaged for public consumption (New Orleans and its long and separate musical tradition notwithstanding). When he died, there was an outpouring of goodwill from unlikely corners; no other artist could have had a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl that brought together Paul McCartney, Pitbull, Snoop Dogg, Harrison Ford, and longtime Miami Heat coach Pat Riley. By all accounts, he was a kind and decent guy in person. And on some level, ruthlessly parlaying a few years spent as a ragged beach burnout into a lifestyle brand worth millions is so archetypically, audaciously American that it’s hard to get mad. I put it to you that Buffett is one of the twentieth century’s great self-made characters, as fascinating and enigmatic in his way as Jay Gatsby. His story stands waiting to be novelized. Rouse up O young men of the Gulf!

---

If Buffett helped create the easy, breezy commercial image of Key West, and McGuane and Hemingway write about the sensations of the body—low down, beat-up, hungover protagonists frying in the sun—Wallace Stevens stands as its representative of the intricate palaces of the mind. Here I enter perilous territory; I’ve always had a bit of a hard time with Stevens. He’s the great poet as philosopher and I am congenitally incapable of philosophizing, the great poet of atheism whereas I incline towards poetry that reifies our connection to the divine, however one chooses to define that. Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction—ugh, no thank you. When I compare him to Emily Dickinson, our other great mapper of the vast interior spaces of consciousness, I feel that even when I can’t understand what she’s getting at, I thrill to her and connect to her, whereas my mind slides right off Stevens at his most obscure.

But all that said, I love Stevens when I read his poetry written in or around or about Key West, where he spent his winters for twenty years. It’s a poetry at once beguiling and playful, full of heavy fragrances, tropical fruits, light reflecting off blue waters. Michael Hofmann in the LRB writes, thrillingly:

It’s both lovely and a caution to imagine Stevens, not just with Tampa cigars and ‘big, rough lemons’ to put in his drinks, but an unshaven patriarch with sandalled feet and a mob of grandchildren. He reads and feels like a hemispheric poet: one not just of and for and from the United States, but of and for and from all the Americas. His actual character may be typical Pennsylvania Dutch, withdrawn, buttoned-up, saturnine (‘From the Misery of Don Joost’ is one suggestive title); his wildly and profusely and lovingly put together tropical world tells another story.

Hofmann also provides this lovely list of titles: ‘Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion’, ‘The Load of Sugar-Cane’, ‘The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade’, ‘Floral Decorations for Bananas’, ‘On the Manner of Addressing Clouds’, ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws.’ He really is weirdly similar to Buffett, when you get down to it. Buffett’s songs are attractive to workaday Americans because they promise a hit of leisure, a couple of boat drinks at the end of a long workday. Even at their most grating, they are suffused with a sort of wistfulness about the difficulties of life and the need to escape, if only briefly. Stevens, famously an insurance agent in Hartford for the majority of his career, often writes about New England in similar tones of exhaustion, as a pinched, cold, Puritan world full of busybodies (“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”) and bleak weather (“The Snow Man”). And this, for all the forbidding concepts drawn from Santayana and Spinoza, makes Stevens charmingly relatable. He can’t wait to get on the first train south so he can bury his toes in the sand.

Key West to Stevens seems to stand for a terminus of consciousness, beyond which lie deeper, unexplored regions—most famously, of course, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” with the woman who sings “beyond the genius of the sea” and the poem’s tension between human-imposed rational order and swirling, primordial reality. But my favorite single image from coconuts-and-hammocks Stevens comes in his late poem “Of Mere Being,” reproduced in full below.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The palm at the end of the mind! There is perhaps no more single psychedelic and mysterious line in American poetry. Stevens’ tropical work can sometimes remind me of reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child, the mid-period Narnia book in which Lewis’s Christian moralism gives way to a vigorous eighteenth-century picaresque, as the heroes sail beyond the edge of the known world and encounter strange, half-allegorical creatures. Beyond Key West, beyond the doors of perception, who knows what one will encounter? Perhaps that is mere orientalism, unfair to the countries that lie south and east of America which simply contain other people with hopes and dreams of their own, but so it goes; no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to stop the human mind from creating metaphorical meridians, beyond which everything suffers a sea-change, into something rich and strange.

---

Pausing to note a theme: all of this Key West media has had some flaw that has kept me from loving it entirely, a slight ambivalence. McGuane, too purple, Stevens, too recondite, Buffett, too corny². There is, however, one unimpeachably perfect piece of art about the island, and, as if it were written in order to provide a good ending for this essay, it somehow manages to combine elements of all three into one mystical, miraculous work.

Bob Dylan’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”...man, what to even say? When all the dust settles, I think late Dylan will be as highly regarded as late Yeats, with “Key West” as his “Circus Animals' Desertion.” It’s the summit of his 21st century output (and I love nearly all of it, including and especially the standards albums), a ten-minute epic anchored by two ghostly chords, a groove like “Sleep Walk” or “Me and Paul” that seems as if it could go on forever, that brings to mind eternity and reincarnation. It encompasses vast and disparate swaths of American history, from McKinley’s assassination to the Delta blues to The Wizard of Oz, and reflects on the whole of life from childhood to old age. When he suddenly swerves into a brief passage about his relationship with God and Judaism, it feels like the most bracingly direct and personal that this man of masks has ever been³.

And whether it’s the afterlife or the bardo or the realm between worlds or just the island itself, whatever Key West stands for in the song clarified why this place I’ve never set foot in has so fascinated me, even if I can’t put it precisely into words. It makes perfect sense that the great bard of our times would choose it as a valedictory symbol on what might be the final track of his final album. He’s attuned to the country he has crisscrossed over and over again for sixty years, and knows where the veil is thin. He’s seen everything, done everything, experienced everything. Now he sits at the southernmost point, half in this world and half out, reduced to a radical simplicity, ready to take that final awesome step beyond the horizon line.

1. For more on Latitude Margaritaville, see Nick Paumgarten’s great New Yorker piece from 2022.

2. I didn’t end up writing about it, but I also should mention Joy Williams’ guidebook to the Florida Keys, which transcends the guidebook form and is captivating and funny the whole way through.

3. “Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute
There were gold fringes on her wedding dress
That's my story, but not where it ends
She's still cute, and we're still friends
Down on the bottom, way down in Key West”