 Luc Sante, at home in Lomontville |
It's doubtful that the artifacts on the walls of Luc Sante's Lomontville home are accidents, but perhaps there was some kismet involved. In one hallway there's an early 1900s spirit photo, a ghostly image of the deceased, and an 1896 X-ray of a baby's arm with the indication that the shot, a pose normale, took 20 to 25 minutes, from a time when such a thing was considered safe. These curiosities speak of eras gone by, evoking not just other worlds but whole belief systems. They seem to be touchstones for the way Sante works as a writer. Under his gaze, a remnant from another era can be a gateway to understanding.
There are clues to this contemplative process in Sante's essay "My Lost City." Sante writes of sifting through street vendors' wares of early-1980s New York, mostly recycled through the garbage: "You had the feeling you would one day find there evidence in your missing twin, your grandfather's secret diary, a photograph of the first girl whose image kept you awake at night." Sante began collecting the old books and mementos he found on the street, the beginning of a journey that would become his book Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. ("My Lost City" is the afterword to the new edition.)
An essayist, social historian, and professor of the history of photography at Bard College, Luc Sante has a talent for mulling over a word, image, object, person, place, epoch—until a poetic truth is disclosed. For instance, Sante's essay on the cool eroticism of cigarettes ("No Smoking") reads as an eloquent eulogy for a beloved friend, and captures both the intimacy of the habit ("Just below in the unconscious lay an impossible image: you and your love object connected by a single cigarette, smoking each other") and its brutality ("Cigarettes, like factory-farmed chickens, are born to die").
Sante is known for a body of work—most notably Low Life and Evidence—that has made him the "go to" guy on historic New York and the slang of outsiders. You want to know the difference between a wipe and a swipe, a roper and a rag? Ask Luc Sante. You need a historical consultant for your movie on old New York? Get Luc Sante, as Martin Scorsese did for Gangs of New York.
It would seem to be an accident, then, that Sante, with his affinity for outsiders and love of cities, would leave Manhattan and move up to the rural Hudson Valley. Even his house, a square Victorian, appears displaced in the rolling farm fields that surround it.
It's a perfect spring day in winter; deep snow, bright sun. As Sante's five-year-old son Raphael amuses himself with a soccer ball in the background, we sit outside to talk. Sante has unearthed such riches reflecting on cities. He once wrote of New York, "Instead of disappearing, local history has been preserved as a seasoning, most visibly in the names of bars." I wonder, how does he see his new terrain, and what details, mundane to my eyes, are for him clues to the past?
"Look right here," he says, gesturing at his Victorian house with its French Mansard roof. "My house is 101 years old. It was built in 1904. The original house burned down in 1900. And it's hysterical. I love it. It's like a piece of folk art. Farmer and wife must have gone into Kingston, where there are a whole bunch of these houses. And you can tell they built it without blueprints. One of the strong points of this kind of architecture is symmetry, and there's no symmetry in this house. Everything is off, including the pitch of the roof. This house is an anomaly right here."
Luc admits he hasn't done much research into the history of this area, but would like to know a lot more. He observes, "Distances have shrunk. Up until the 1950s, kids in Woodstock had to go to Kingston to go to high school. They would usually board in Kingston during the week and come home on weekends." That fact—a Woodstock empty of teenagers all week—conjures a different world.
"Somebody really has got to write a history of the African American culture of Ulster and neighboring counties. I'm struck by the fact that one of the villages that was sunk under the Ashokan Reservoir was Broadhead Bridge. A large percentage of the Broadhead family was black. Then there's the Peg Leg Bates story, and the Father Divine story, which has not really been chronicled either, as far as I know. Father Divine was 'God,' and the buildings he called 'the heavens' were mostly in New York City, but he had four farms up here. He had the better part of Krumville. He had the Hasbrouck house in Marbletown."
We speak of the local legend of The Vly being haunted, and Sante tells of another magnetic area. "In old books, people talk of The Tongore. I have a postcard that shows the area of The Tongore, and it's from the part that was sunk under the reservoir. You ask people where The Tongore is and they're vague. To loosely quote the 1912 book Picturesque Ulster, they'll say, "you know, it's kind of over there, but you'll know it."
"Years before I moved here," Sante continues, "I bought a postcard that was sent to somebody in Lomontville from Coney Island. And I thought, where's Lomontville? I had no idea, and I wind up living here."
Born in French-speaking Belgium, Sante emigrated to and grew up in New Jersey. He has written extensively on his own history, both in a memoir on his Belgian roots, The Factory of Facts, and for an anthology entitled The Genius of Language. His parents spoke French, English, and sometimes Walloon. "Walloon is the ancient language of our people. It's the tenth romance language, although it's been downgraded to a dialect. People say a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It's a language if it's powerful, a dialect if it's not. Walloon is an earthy language. It reminds me of Yiddish in certain ways; it's a psychologically complex, but resolutely non-abstract language. My parents used to forget what language they were speaking, and they'd lapse from English into Walloon because there are so many similarities. I would not have become a writer if I hadn't learned English as a second language."
I step over a train (Raphael's), on the way to Luc's study. Pinned to the wall are several rows of old postcards that look to be of small-town America. Postcards are by nature accidental. They are chosen on the run, often not very carefully, travel miles, and can end up re-sold at flea markets, in the hands of a stranger—a disposable litter of travel communication. I wonder about the happenstance that brought those postcards to Luc Sante's wall, and the postcard to Lomontville that seemed to presage his arrival to the town. With his uncanny ability to look at the ordinary and see the luminous, I secretly hope for an eventual essay on our rural area and the kind of small-town America depicted in the postcards.
Sante's wife, author Melissa Holbrook Pierson, has spread the kitchen table with cutout hearts and glue, homemade Valentines for Raphael's classmates. Luc looks down at all this and says, "I had things I wanted to say about doom." He is referring to our earlier conversation about the state of the world. I had planned to ask Sante, as a historian, for his insights into where we're headed, but it seems impossible now. The warm spring-like air, bright sun, the red and pink hearts strewn about the table—the topic is suddenly unbearable. A few lines from Sante's "The Unknown Soldier," a haunting poetic imagining of every man's end time, flash in my mind: "So give my eyes to the eye bank, give my blood to the blood bank. Make my hair into switches, put my teeth into rattles, sell my heart to the junkman."
Sante goes to check on Raphael, who has been yelling from the next room, demanding the spelling of certain words. When Sante returns, he announces "Raphael wrote the sentence, 'We go to California on the train.' I think he's predicting the future."
A train, a postcard, a cigarette, a song—wherever Luc Sante turns his poetic gaze, he passes a generous gift on to his readers: new eyes with which to see.