About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (2 page)

In the middle of what was, for me, this intensely physical landscape, another man emerged who engaged a different part of my mind. He was an aeronautical engineer at Hughes Aircraft and also an artist. He’d taught my mother painting in college in Alabama and had been her first husband. After their divorce, he moved to California and remarried. When my father left he became like a father to me. He drove a blue-gray sports car, an Austin Healey convertible, and I rode with him swiftly along winding Mulholland Drive above the city and down the broad promenade of the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. One Christmas he built a large layout for my trains, a landscape of papier-mâché mountains and tunnels with a handcrafted bridge and a scenic backdrop he’d painted.

For years I believed my childhood nothing out of the ordinary, but it was a sort of bohemian existence. Mother was strict with Dennis and me about table and social manners. She disciplined us
and was conscientious about our schooling and protective of our emotional lives. But I remember no impatience, no indifference toward imagination. She embraced our drawings, our stories, and our Tinkertoy kingdoms, and she drove us to many intriguing places in our green 1934 Ford coupe—to Boulder (later, Hoover) Dam, the La Brea Tar Pits. And she invited engaging, independent men and women to the house for dinner.

The parents of some of my classmates and some of Mother’s friends worked in the motion picture industry and in television, but I do not remember that their professions colored my life in any untoward way. Work in Hollywood, like work at Lockheed or other aircraft companies, didn’t seem any more remarkable to us as children then than farming or teaching. I was more interested, actually, in farming and in what was done by people who worked astride a horse, a mysterious and magnificent beast, with its shuddering flanks and high nickers.

One unusual thing about those years was that I raised pigeons. Many of them were tumblers, a kind of bird that folds its wings and then plummets from a height, only to pull up sharply inches from the ground. A tumbler then beats its way back up into the sky from which it plummets again. Sometimes a dozen or more will tumble together, careening past each other as they fall.

Watching the pigeons fly was an experience so exhilarating I would turn slowly under them in circles of glee. They would spiral above the house before flying off every day, and the tumblers would fall toward an adjacent field. They’d disappear behind lofty banks of aging eucalyptus north and south of the house in flocks of thirty and forty. When they returned in the afternoon, I found that faithfulness, their soft cooing at dusk in the pigeon coop, as soothing as my mother’s fingers running through my hair.

I could not have understood at this age of course, only eight or nine, what it might mean to have a voice one day, to speak as a writer speaks. I would have been baffled by the thought. The world I inhabited—the emotions I imagined horses to have, the sound of a night wind clattering ominously in the dry leaves of eucalyptus trees—I imagined as a refuge, one that would be lost
to me if I tried to explain it. The countryside around me was a landscape full of small, wild animals. When I walked alone down windbreaks of Russian olives or up sandy washes and met them, I’d stand still until they went on. They did not seem to my mind animals that wanted to be known.

My future, as I vaguely pictured it then, would include going to high school in the valley, maybe Stanford University afterward, and then perhaps I would work toward owning a farm. Like my friends, though, I had few concrete thoughts beyond repairing my bike and being included at the periphery of the circle of older boys, the ones who possessed such gleaming, loud, extraordinarily powerful, and customized automobiles.

When I was eleven my mother married again, and we moved back East to an apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan on East Thirty-fifth Street. I would live there for six years before going away to college. This change was wrenching: socially, economically, and geographically. I was bewildered by it—a penthouse apartment, Jesuit prep school, Saturday afternoon trapshooting at the New York Athletic Club’s Travers Island range, debutant balls at the Plaza and the Pierre. Gone were the rural, agricultural, and desert landscapes to which I was so attached. They were replaced by summers on the Jersey shore and by visits to eastern Alabama, where my mother had grown up. But, for the first time, I had an allowance. And I began to grasp from my new classmates, all boys, what went with this new life with no cars, where no one bicycled alone at night to the sound of big sprinklers slow-chucking water over alfalfa fields.

I recall a moment that first eastern summer of 1956, a scene I’ve come back to often. My parents put Dennis and me in a summer camp on the North Fork of eastern Long Island for a few weeks. Among my bunkmates were Thom and John Steinbeck, the writer’s two sons. On parents day, John and Elaine Steinbeck would come over from their home in Sag Harbor in a cabin cruiser. He would row a dinghy in to shore to fetch the boys and take them back out for the afternoon to the moored boat. I might have been reading “The Red Pony” or other stories in
The
Long Valley
then. What I most remember, though, was that this man had come here from California, like me, and that things seemed to be going well for him. I was having a difficult time that first summer adjusting to city life. I missed the open-endedness of the other landscape, with its hay fields and its perimeter of unsettled mountains. And what I missed was embodied somehow in this burly man, rowing the boat away with his boys. Before I left for college I read all of Steinbeck’s books. I drew from them a sense of security.

Later that same summer my parents rented a house for a few weeks near Montauk Point, at the tip of Long Island. My father, as I would always refer to him later, took my brother and me fishing several times on charter boats. As it happened, Peter Matthiessen—a writer I would later come to admire and get to know—was captaining just such a boat out of Montauk that August. Thirty years later, crossing Little Peconic Bay to the west of Montauk with him, in a boat he was thinking of buying, we tried to determine whether it could have been his boat that my father had hired one of those times.

I thrived in the city in spite of the change in landscape. I focused on my studies—Latin, history, English literature, French, art (a class taught by the painter John Sloan’s widow)—a standard Jesuit regimen, light in the sciences. I developed into a fast, strong athlete, and graduated with letters in three varsity sports and a scholastic average high enough to have gained me entry to almost any university.

I felt privileged rather than deserving of all this. I understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world. In my private heart, though, thinking back to the years in California and forgetting those early days of privilege at Orienta Point, I felt I was dressed in borrowed clothes. How did I come to be here?

The summer after I graduated from high school I traveled to Europe with fifteen of my classmates. We flew to Lisbon and then
spent two months being driven in a small Fiat tour bus with huge windows through Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and West Germany. Later we crossed the Channel and toured England and Ireland. Among hundreds of things I did, I remember laying my hand on the thigh of Agesander’s statue of Laocoön in the Vatican Museums and feeling the sinew of muscle in the white marble; seeing a matador gored and then spun like a pinwheel on a bull’s horn in the corrida in Pamplona; an ethereal light that seemed to bathe Napoleon’s catafalque in blue in Paris; and a vast cemetery of identical white crosses, ranked over green hills in northern France, a bucolic landscape lovely, benign, and enormously sad.

In the fall of 1962 I entered the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. Once I got my driver’s license I began leaving school on weekends, camping out or sleeping in the cars I borrowed, whatever was necessary to see the surrounding country from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to West Virginia. I once drove to Mississippi and back with my roommate over a weekend—eleven hundred miles—just to see it, drawn by little more than the lure of the Natchez Trace.

During my sophomore and junior years I started writing stories that had nothing to do with classroom assignments. I understood the urge to write as a desire to describe what happened, what I saw, when I went outside. The book that engaged me most along these lines was
Moby-Dick
, which I read three times before I entered college.

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

My attitude toward language and story crystallized on a single afternoon in my sophomore year. I cut a class to hear Robert Fitzgerald read from his new translation of
The Odyssey
. I’d heard the translation was brillnant; what was spellbinding about his reading, however, was the way the audience became galvanized
in beauty by his presentation. History, quest, longing, metered prose, moral consternation, and fantastic image all came together in that room. The feeling broadened and calmed us. Whatever Fitzgerald did in that hour, that’s what I wanted to do.

I was driven to write, but of course anguished over my efforts. Who was I to speak? What had I to say? As a college student of nineteen, I was being encouraged in the idea that if I spoke I would be heard. The privilege that ensured this, however, was the accident of my mother’s third marriage. It was nothing I’d earned. And much of what seemed to me so worth addressing—the psychological draw of landscape, that profound mystery I sensed in wild animals (which reading Descartes had done nothing to dissuade)—was regarded as peculiar territory by other nascent writers at the university.

In my senior year at Notre Dame, at bat in an intramural baseball game, I took a high inside pitch that shattered the stone in my senior ring. I left the setting empty. The emptiness came to symbolize doubts I’d developed about my education. I’d learned a lot, but I had not learned it in the presence of women or blacks or Jews or Koreans. Something important, those refinements and objections, had been omitted.

When I departed the university in 1966 (with a degree in Communication Arts) I left in order to discover a voice and a subject, though this was not at all clear then. I floundered in two jobs for a year, married, finished a graduate degree with the thought that I would teach prep school, and then entered the master of fine arts program in writing at the University of Oregon. I left that program after only a semester, but matriculated at the university for more than a year, during which time I met a singular teacher in the English department, a man named Barre Toelken. He helped me frame the questions seething inside me then about how justice, education, and other Enlightenment ideals could be upheld against the depth of prejudice and the fields of ignorance I saw everywhere around me.

Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred. They
did not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the immanence of the divine in both. And they regarded landscape as a component as integral to the development of personality and social order as we take the Oedipus complex and codified law to be.

As a guest in the Toelkens’ home, I frequently met scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture. I didn’t consider that these people spoke a truth no one else possessed; but, listening to them, I saw the inadequacy of my education. It lacked any suggestion that these voices were necessary, that they were relevant. Further, it became clear to me in the Toelkens’ home that their stories, despite the skilled dramatizing of human triumph and failure, were destined for quarantine in the society of which I was a part. I was not going to find these voices in American magazines.

In the years after those first encounters with senior Native American men, itinerant Asian poets, black jazz musicians, and translators, I deliberately began to seek the company of people outside my own narrow cultural bounds. I was drawn especially to men and women who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.

The effect of these encounters was not a belief that I was now able to speak for such people—a notion I find dangerous as well as absurd—but an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the only voice. My truth was not the one truth. My tongue did not compose a pinnacle language. These other voices were as indispensable to our survival as variations in our DNA.

In my earliest essays, I wanted to report what
others
were thinking, and I was driven by a feeling that these other voices were being put asunder by “progress” in its manifold forms.

Although I’m wary of pancultural truths, I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one’s life. Wherever I’ve traveled—Kenya,
Chile, Australia, Japan—I’ve found that the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.