Introductory chapter of Graceland, by Karal Ann Marling:

"Going to Graceland"

"Tourists go to Graceland looking for all sorts of things, not the least of which is entertainment. They don't all believe that Elvis died for their sins and just might rise again during the 8 a.m. tour on a Sunday morning, which is the one they happen to be booked on. It's unfortunate that Protestantism doesn't have official saints to bridge the gap between the here and the hereafter. You could do worse than good St. Elvis, though. Great sinners make great Catholic saints but Americans generally recoil from that much unrestrained wickedness. Elvis Presley's sins were blessedly ordinary ones magnified by money. Fooling around. Lying to yourself. Popping a pill. Sitting on the sofa when there are better things to be done. Our sins. Elvis died of our sins, if not for them, and so will we. It's sad to see the graves in his garden but then it's always sad to visit the family plot, figure out which place is left for you--and contemplate the void.

"Graceland's no void, either. It's full of things, crammed into corners and crowded onto shelves. All the cabinets have at least one compartment with a solid wooden door. You know they barely got that door to close. Company's coming. You do the white tornado number and sweep up a month's worth of pencil ends, Cracker Jack prizes, loose change, and dog-eared supermarket paperbacks in twenty seconds. You shovel everything into the nearest receptacle, slam the door, and pray. Graceland strains and bulges with that kind of secret stuff. It's like looking at your own living room through the eyes of the Avon lady.

"Albert Goldman, who hated Elvis, said in his biography that nothing in the whole house was `worth a dime.' Well it isn't so. Those of us born any time between 1935 and 1977--the age of Elvis--can tell you to the dime what everything in Graceland is worth, in hard cash, in hours of overtime, in months of dropping quarters into polyvinyl pigs. The Price-Is-Right generation can extrapolate the dollar value of Elvis's extra-long sofa from the cost of normal models without breaking a sweat. When the dining-room guides tell tour groups the name of Elvis and Priscilla's Noritake china pattern, you can watch the mental calculators start to work. Everybody's got a niece who listed Noritake on her bridal registry. Everybody, at one time or another, priced the gravy boat and settled for a salad plate.

"The house is full of things that we all have or used to have, or used to want, or hate...

"The den doesn't match anything. If the living room suggests being thirty-five and prosperous in the early `80s, with a point to make to guests, the den is seedier and younger. The memories aren't in sync. But then, they never are...

"Historic houses are peculiar places, austere and unreal. Try to imagine staying overnight. How would you brush you teeth at Mount Vernon? Could you read in bed there? What's for breakfast at Monticello? Tell me how Biltmore would smell at breakfast or lunch. In Graceland, there's no need to imagine. It's plain as day. We've been here before. When Elvis's Aunt Delta still lived in the house, she used to leave the kitchen door ajar. The machinery of real life showed and the smell of bacon settled in the den during morning tours. When we are gone, you and I, with our waterpiks and percolators, maybe Graceland will look historical and dead. For now, the house quivers with the shock that clings to places where life has been interrupted, stopped dead in its tracks. Death and sorrow came here, to a place we know, down to the price tags on the ashtrays. And they will come for us some day.

"Graceland and the other places Elvis Presley stopped at and lived in and marveled over along the way all bear the marks of living, the scars of hard use. Memories cling to them, even when the memories are Elvis's, and he is dead. But we still live here, in these same places. We add things to them. We take things away. The world of houses and hotels, housing projects and tourist traps comforts us or kills us. It sings to us, in lovely words like Tupelo and Tennessee. In the glow of neon lights along dark streets, it makes us into creatures of the night, all blue or red or pink. It summons up the Civil War in a fusillade of pediments and columns. Howdy Doody in a picture window. Ghosts walk through houses, calling out our names. Ghosts walk through Graceland alongside every tourist, whispering softly about the places we call home.

"Elvis probably is everywhere, as Mojo Nixon's tribute song insists. But not among the crowds of pilgrims who shuffle through his house every day except Christmas, listening to the whispers. He's dead all right, and that's the point of coming. When Greil Marcus puts `dead' first in the title of his book, he means to say that Elvis is as much a fore in the world of the living as he ever was. Dead Elvis. Sexy Elvis. Las Vegas Elvis, pictured on a calendar or a wristwatch, in a costume dipped in diamonds. Video Elvis, thin as a rake and handsome as ten movie stars, forever. Take your pick. But in some essential way, he's gone from here. Graceland is our house now, bought and paid for with the price of a ticket. Elvis has left the building. The story that the silent walls have to tell is our story. Softly and tenderly, the ghosts call our names."

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Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Illustrations: Karal Ann Marling

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