In Rough Country (30 page)

 

Early Influences
. Often it's said that the only influences that matter greatly to us come early in our lives, and I think that this must be so. Of the thousands—tens of thousands?—of books I've probably read, in part or entirely, many of which have surely exerted some very real influence on my writing life, only a few shimmer with a sort of supernatural significance, like the brightest stars in the firmament: Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, Frances Hodgson Burnett's
The Secret Garden
, and
The Gold Bug and Other Stories
by Edgar Allan Poe—the great books of my childhood.

Add to which, in early adolescence, at a time when I borrowed books from the Lockport Public Library each Saturday when my mother drove into town to shop for groceries, such thrilling titles as Henry David Thoreau's
Walden
, Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights
, Ernest Hemingway's
In Our Time
, William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
—the great books of a more self-consciously literary era in my life.

Of course as a student I had influential teachers—a succession of wonderfully encouraging, inspiring and insightful teachers both at Williamsville High School, in Williamsville, New York, and at Syracuse University, from which I graduated in 1960. As a child, I attended a one-room schoolhouse in rural Niagara County, New York, north of Buffalo, of which I've written elsewhere—a hardscrabble “education experience”
that has provided useful memories of the kind we all retrieve and hone for nostalgic purposes but not an education of which one might reasonably boast, still less present as ideal or “influential” in any significant way. (My memory of our Amazonian teacher Mrs. Dietz, confronted with the rebelliousness and general obtrusiveness of six-foot-tall farm boys with no love of book learning or even of sitting still for more than a few minutes at a time, approaches the succinctness of Faulkner's terse encomium for the black housekeeper, Dilsey:
They endured
.)

If I had a single mentor who guided me into my writing life—or at any rate encouraged me—it wasn't any of my teachers, wonderful though they were, or any of my university colleagues in the years to come, but my grandmother Blanche Woodside, my father's mother. (“Oates” was the name of my grandmother's first husband.) In our not-very-prosperous farmhouse in Millersport, New York, at the northern edge of Erie County near the Erie Barge Canal, there were no books at all—
not even a Bible
. (How curious this was wouldn't occur to me until I was much older. Though eventually my parents converted to Catholicism after the sudden, premature death of my mother's father, when I was in junior high school, the household of my early, formative years was utterly without religion of any kind—the prevailing tone of secular skepticism was set by both my mother's father, a Hungarian immigrant who worked in a steel foundry in Tonawanda and as a village blacksmith at home in Millersport, and by my father, Fred Oates, who'd had to drop out of grade school to help support his mother after his father, Carleton Oates, abandoned them in or about 1917.) Along with articles of clothing she'd sewed or
knitted for me, my grandmother gave me books for Christmas and my birthday, year after year; when I was fourteen, inspired by my predilection for filling tablet after tablet with my school-girl handwriting and drawings, in the way of a budding serial novelist, my grandmother stunned my parents and me by giving me a Remington portable typewriter for my birthday!—an astonishing gift, considering that my grandmother had very little money and that typewriters were virtually unheard-of in rural households like ours.

Most of the children's storybooks and young-adult novels my grandmother gave me have faded from my memory, like the festive holiday occasions themselves. The great single—singular—book of my childhood, if not of my entire life, is
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, which my grandmother gave me when I was eight years old, and which, with full-page illustrations by John Tenniel, in a slightly oversized edition with a transparent plastic cover, exerted a powerful influence on my susceptible child's imagination, a kind of hypnotic spell that lasted for years.

Here is my springboard into the imagination! Here is my model of what a storybook can be.

I was too young for such exalted thoughts, of course. Far too young even to grasp that the name stamped on the spine of the book—
Lewis Carroll
—was the author's name, still less that it was the author's pen name. (Many years would pass before I became aware that the author of the
Alice
books was an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, an eccentric bachelor with a predilection for telling fantastical stories to the young daughters of his Oxford colleagues and photo
graphing them in suggestive and seductive poses evocative of Humbert Humbert's nymphets of a later, less innocent era.) My enchantment with this gift began with the book itself as a physical and aesthetic object, quite unlike anything else in our household: both
Alice
books were published in a single volume under the imprint Illustrated Junior Library, Grosset & Dunlap (1946). Immediately, the striking illustrations by John Tenniel entered my imagination, ranged across the field of the book's cover—back and front—in a dreamlike assemblage of phantasmagoric figures as in a somewhat less malevolent landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. (I still have this book. It is one of the precious possessions in my library. What a surprise to discover that the book that loomed so large in my childhood imagination is only slightly larger than an ordinary book.)

The appeal of
Alice
and her bizarre adventures to an eight-year-old girl in a farming community in upstate New York is obvious. Initially, the little-girl reader is likely to be struck by the fact that the story's heroine is a girl of her own approximate age who confronts extraordinary adventures with admirable equanimity, common sense, and courage. (We know that Alice isn't much more than eight years old because Humpty-Dumpty says slyly to her that she might have “left off” at seven—meaning, Alice might have died at seven.) Like most children, Alice talks to herself—but not in the silly prattling way of most children: “‘Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself rather sharply; ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!'” (Obviously, Alice is echoing adult admonitions—she has interiorized the stoicism of her elders.) Instead of being
alarmed or terrified, as a normal child would be, Alice marvels, “Curiouser and curiouser!”—as if the world so fraught with shape-changing and threats of dissolution and even, frequently, cannibalism were nothing more than a puzzle to be solved or a game to be played like croquet, cards, or chess. (Alice discovers that the Looking-Glass world is a continual game of chess in which, by pressing forward, and not backing down in her confrontations with Looking-Glass inhabitants, she will become Queen Alice—though it isn't a very comfortable state pinioned between two elderly snoring queens.) The
Alice
books are gold mines of aphoristic instruction: “Who cares for you?…You're nothing but a pack of cards!” Alice cries fearlessly, nullifying the authority of malevolent adults as, at the harrowing conclusion of
Looking-Glass
, she confronts the taboo-fact of “cannibalism” at the heart of civilization:

The banquet dissolves into nightmare as the White Queen seizes Alice's hair in both hands and screams “Take care of yourself!…Something's going to happen!”

Both
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
are brilliantly imagined fantasies that shade by degrees into nightmare—only to be routed by Alice's impetuousness and quick thinking. The child reader is meant to take solace in the possibility that, like Alice, she can exorcise adult vanity and cruelty; she may be very young, and very small, but she can assert herself if she knows how. Both
Alice
nightmares end with Alice simply waking up—returned to a comfortable domestic world of kittens and tea things—and no adults in sight.

In essence, I think I am, still, this child-self so like an American cousin of Lewis Carroll's Alice: my deepest, most yearning and most (naively) hopeful self. I think that I am still waiting to be “influenced”—by a loving mentor, or even a monster. By someone.

Who?

W
riters, particularly novelists, are inextricably linked to
place
. It's impossible to think of Charles Dickens and not to think of Dickens's London; impossible to think of James Joyce and not to think of Joyce's Dublin; and so with Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor—each is inextricably linked to a region, as to a language-dialect of particular sharpness, vividness, idiosyncrasy. We are all regionalists in our origins, however “universal” our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must
take root
—almost literally.

For this reason, “home” isn't a street address, or a residence, or, in Robert Frost's cryptic words, the place where, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in”—but where you find yourself in your most haunting dreams. These may be dreams of numinous beauty, or they may be nightmares—but they are the dreams most embedded in memory,
thus encoded deep in the brain: the first memories to be retained and the last memories to be surrendered.

 

Over the years of what seems to me both a long and a swiftly passing lifetime “home” has been, for me, several places: Millersport, New York, and nearby Lockport, where I was born and lived until the age of eighteen; Detroit, Michigan, where I lived with my young husband Raymond Smith, 1961 to 1968—when he taught English at Wayne State University and I taught English at the University of Detroit; and Princeton, New Jersey, where we lived for forty-eight years at 9 Honey Brook Drive, while Ray edited the
Ontario Review
and Ontario Review Press books and I taught at Princeton University until Ray's death in February 2008. Now I live a half-mile from that house in a new phase of my life, with my new husband Charles Gross, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who is also a writer and photographer. The “contemporary French provincial” house in which we live on three acres fronting a small lake is “home” in the most immediate sense—this is the address to which our mail is delivered, and each of us hopes that this will be the last house of our lives; but if “home” is the repository of our deepest, most abiding and most poignant dreams, the landscape that haunts us recurringly, then “home” for me would be upstate New York—the rural crossroads of Millersport, on the Tonawanda Creek, and the city of Lockport on the Erie Barge Canal.

 

As in a vivid and hallucinatory dream I am being taken—my hand in hers—by my grandmother Blanche Woodside to the
Lockport Public Library on East Avenue, Lockport. I am an eager child of seven or eight and this is in the mid 1940s. The library is a beautiful building like no other I've seen close up, an anomaly in this city block beside the dull red brick of the YMCA to one side and a dentist's office to the other, across the street is Lockport High School, another older, dull-brick building. The library—which, at my young age, I could not have known had been built by WPA funds in 1936—has something of the look of a Greek temple; not only is its architecture distinctive, with elegantly ascending steps, a portico and four columns, a facade with six large, rounded, latticed windows and, on top, a kind of spire, but the building is set back from the street behind a wrought iron rail fence with a gate, amid a very green jewel-like lawn.

The library for grown-ups is upstairs, beyond a dauntingly wide and high-ceilinged doorway; the library for children is more accessible, downstairs and to the right. Inside this cheery brightly lit space there is an inexpressible smell of floor polish, library paste, books—that particular
library smell
which conflates, in my memory, with the
classroom smell
of floor polish, chalk dust, books so deeply imprinted in my memory. For even as a young child I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

What is most striking in the children's library are the shelves and shelves of books—bookcases lining the walls—books with brightly colored spines—astonishing to a little girl whose family lives in a farmhouse in the country where books are almost wholly unknown. That these books are available
for children—for a child like me—all these books!—leaves me dazed, dazzled.

The special surprise of this memorable day is that my grandmother has arranged for me to be given a library card, so that I can “withdraw” books from this library—though I'm not a resident of Lockport, nor even of Niagara County. Since Blanche Woodside is a Lockport resident, and I am her granddaughter, some magical provision has been made to include me; or maybe, as I would not suspect until later, years later, my grandmother paid for my library card.

The Lockport Public Library has been an illumination in my life. In that dimension of the soul in which time is collapsed, and the past is contemporaneous with the present, it still is. Growing up in a not-very-prosperous rural community lacking a common cultural or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked—worked, and worked—and had little time for reading more than newspapers—I was mesmerized by books and by what might be called “the life of the mind”—the life that
was not
manual labor, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young I had my “farm chores”—but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side, and to read.

There was no greater happiness for me than to read—children's books at first, then “young adult”—and beyond. No greater happiness than to make my way along the seemingly infinite shelves of books in the Lockport Public Library, draw
ing my forefinger across the spines. My grandmother Blanche Woodside was an avid reader whom all the librarians knew well, and whom they obviously liked very much; two or even three times a week my grandmother checked books out of the library—novels, biographies—I remember the plastic covers—I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and “the life of the mind”—and now, such subjects have become my life.

 

What we dream of, that we are.

What I most love about Lockport is its timelessness. Beyond the newer facades of Main Street—literally just behind the block of buildings on the northern side—is the Erie Barge Canal: this impressive stretch of the 524-mile New York State canal connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and traversing the breadth of the state. For residents of the area who have gone to live elsewhere, it's the canal—so deep-set in what appears to be solid rock, you can barely see it unless you come close, to lean over the railing of the wide bridge at the foot of Transit Road—that resurfaces in dreams: the singular height of the falling water, the steep rock walls, the gritty, melancholy smell of stone, froth, agitated water; the spectacle of the locks opening, taking in water, and closing; the ever-shifting water levels bearing boats that seem miniaturized in the slow methodical ritual-like process. “Locks-port” might have been the original, more accurate name, since there are numerous locks,
to accommodate the especially steep incline of the land. (Lake Erie to the west is on a much higher elevation than the Hudson River, and Lockport—“Uptown” and “Lowertown”—is built on an escarpment.) Standing on the bridge—“the widest single-span bridge in the world” as it was once identified—you feel a sensation of vertigo as you peer down at, or into, the canal fifty feet below; not so overwhelming as the sensation you feel staring at the legendary falls at Niagara twenty miles to the west but haunting, unnerving and uncanny. (Think of “uncanny” in the Freudian sense—
Unheimlich
—a sign/symptom of a deep-rooted turbulence associated with buried and unarticulated desires, wishes, fears.) In the midst of city-life, at the very noontide of day-life, there is the primary, primitive vein of elemental life in which human identity is vanished, as if it had never been. Falling water, turbulent water, dark frothy water churning as if it were alive—somehow, this stirs the soul, makes us uneasy on even cheery visits back home. You stare down into the canal for a long dazed minute and then turn back blinking—where?

You didn't let Joyce see, did you? Oh—Fred!

Not a thing for a little girl to see. I hope she didn't…

An early memory of being with Daddy—in Lockport—and there is a street blocked with traffic, and people—one of the narrow streets that run parallel to the canal, on the farther side of downtown—and Daddy has stopped his car to get out and see what is happening—and I have gotten out too, to follow him—except I can't follow him, there are too many people—I hear shouts—I don't see what is happening—unless
(somehow) I do see—for I have a vague memory of “seeing”—a blurred memory of—is it a man's body, a corpse, being hauled out of the canal?

Joyce didn't see. Joyce was nowhere near.

Yes I'm sure!

 

(Yet years later, I will write of this. I will write of a little girl seeing, or almost-seeing, a man's body hauled from a canal. I will write of the canal set deep in the earth, in what appears to be solid rock; I will write of the turbulence of falling water, steep rock-sides, the frothy agitation of water, unease and distress and yet at the core, childlike wonderment. And I will write—repeatedly, obsessively—of the fact that adults cannot shield their children from such sights, as adults cannot shield their children from the very fact of growing up, and losing them.)

 

So strange—“uncanny.”

That, between the ages of eleven and fifteen—through sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades—I was a “commuter student” first at John E. Pound School on High Street, Lockport; then at North Park Junior High in the northeast section of town near Outwater Park. (Though the term “commuter student” wasn't in anyone's vocabulary at that time.) For five grades, I'd gone to a one-room schoolhouse in Millersport—then for no reason that was ever explained, to me at least, I was transferred to Lockport, seven miles to the north—a considerable distance for a child, at the time.

In this era before school buses—at least in this rural corner of Niagara County—such “commuter students” were required
to wait out on the highway for Greyhound buses. Decades later I can recall the sudden sight—at a distance of perhaps a quarter-mile—as the large bus seemed to emerge out of nowhere, at the intersection of Millersport Highway with Transit Road, headed in the direction of my family home which was on Transit Road.
The bus!

Not a greyhound it seemed to me but a large ungainly beast—a buffalo, or a bison.

For my predominant fear, for years, was that I would miss the bus, and miss school, prospects to be dreaded. And there was the daunting fact of
the bus
itself—where would I sit each morning? With whom?—most of the other passengers were adults, and strangers.

Here began my “romance” with Lockport, which I experienced as a solitary individual mostly walking—walking, and walking—along the streets of downtown, and along residential streets; over the wide windswept bridge above the canal at Transit Street, and over the narrower bridge above the canal, at Market Street; on paths above the towpath, winding through vacant overgrown lots in the vicinity of Niagara Street; and on the shaky plank pedestrian bridge that ran parallel and unnervingly close beside the railroad bridge above the canal. Many days, after school I went to my grandmother Woodside's house on Harvey Avenue, and later on Grand Street, across town; after visiting with Grandma, I took a city bus downtown, or walked; to this day, I have a proclivity for walking—
walking, walking!
—I love to be in motion, and I am very curious about everything and everyone I see, as I'd learned to be, as a young child; and so I have felt invisible also, as a child feels herself
invisible, beneath the radar of adult attention, or so it seemed to me at the time. For Lockport which I'd previously experienced only in the company of my mother, my father or my grandmother seemed very different to me, when I was alone. The small city—30,000 residents in the 1950s, now 22,000—became an adventure, or a series of adventures, culminating with the Greyhound bus to take me back home to Millersport.

Very few girls of eleven or twelve would be allowed today to wander alone as I did, nor to take a bus as I did; to be allowed, or obliged, to wait for long headache-wracked minutes—or hours—in the dreary Lockport bus station, located near Harrison's Radiator, Lockport's single large factory, a division of General Motors where my father worked as a tool and dye designer for forty years. (Why Daddy didn't drive me into Lockport in the morning, and take me home in the late afternoon, I have no idea. Was his work-schedule just too different from my school-schedule? There must have been some reason, but now there is no one left to ask.) What a desolate, ill-smelling place the Greyhound bus station was, especially in winter!—and winters are long, windy and bitter-cold in upstate New York; what derelict-looking individuals were to be found there, slouched in the filthy vinyl chairs waiting—or maybe not waiting—for buses. And I in their midst, a young girl with textbooks and notebook, hoping no one would speak to me, nor even look at me.

It was so, I was prone to headaches in those years. Not so severe as migraines, I think. Maybe because I strained my eyes reading, or trying to read, in that wanly lit, inhospitable waiting room, as on the jolting Greyhound bus itself.

How innocent and oblivious the 1950s seem to us now, at least so far as parental oversight of children is concerned. Where many of my Princeton friends are hyper-vigilant about their children, obsessively involved in their children's lives—driving them everywhere, calling their cell phones, providing nannies for sixteen-year-olds—my parents seemingly had no concern at all that I might be endangered, spending so much time alone. I don't mean that my parents didn't love me, or were negligent in any way, but only that, in the 1950s, in an era in which “sex crimes”—like “domestic violence”—had not yet been named and classified—there was not much awareness of such dangers; it wasn't uncommon that adolescent girls hitchhiked on roads like Transit Road—which I'd never done.