My Father Before Me (26 page)

56

The town of Great Falls, Montana, hugs a bend of the fretfully meandering Missouri River. The falls themselves are famous for stunning Lewis and Clark with their unruly beauty, then setting them back weeks in their transcontinental journey, forcing them to lift their dripping boats and supplies from the water and portage for miles through untamed terrain. When I moved to Great Falls after college, lured by an offer to be an actual professional television reporter for eight hundred dollars a month, the area seemed hardly less wild and remote to me. The town was at the southern edge of a glacial plain of wheat fields and ranches and archaeological digs and tiny unincorporated outposts with one blinking stoplight and two taverns. Winter began in October and ended in late spring; in the midst of it, with the town ice-bound, with mountains of plowed snow shoved to the edges of parking lots and the sides of streets, the little hairs in my nose and ears froze as soon as I stepped outdoors. I hadn't known they could do that. Until my car's ignition clicked and clicked and refused to turn over in the morning, I hadn't known that I should attach a portable heater to the engine at night to keep it warm while I slept. My first apartment was across the street from an air force base, close enough to its radar system that, every twenty-three seconds, my television and stereo and clock radio beeped wanly. Other than being a home to flyboys, Great
Falls was a town of cowboy painters and cattle auctions and pickups with gun racks and Reagan stickers and Patsy Cline on the radio wringing my heart and Merle Haggard singing outlandishly of the good old days “when a girl could still cook and still would,” his throaty, taut-jawed baritone making him sound almost persuasive. In the local movie theaters, the feature film was abruptly halted midway through and the lights flicked on to give moviegoers a chance to buy popcorn and Goobers. The town's major landmark, looming darkly and conspicuously on the north side of the river, was a giant smokestack—once the world's tallest—sticking up like an extinguished cigarette. The stack had been left there by the Anaconda Copper Company, which had closed its smelter and refinery and abandoned the town a couple of years before I arrived. One of the first stories I reported for KRTV was about the demolition of the stack, to great fanfare, before a crowd of tens of thousands.

Shortly after I arrived in Montana, my mother wrote to me. She was thriving, having settled into a career as an elementary school principal and gotten married again—to Russ, whom, as chance would have it, she had known thirty years earlier, in high school. He, too, had had a long first marriage and several children. As a teenager, Russ had been sweet on my mother; to his everlasting joy, they once shared a kiss, chaste though my mother may have meant it to be. It was eight years now since my father had died; in those years, my mother had not spoken much to me about him. However, as I began my TV career, he was on her mind:

Chris, I have no doubt that you will reach all your goals, even if they change along the way. You've got what it takes: ambition, perseverance, youth, and talent. My one concern is that you have a lot of the qualities that your dad had, the ones that helped him reach his career goals, but they also prevented him from taking side trips and
relaxing once in a while. He was very hard on himself and could never quite reach the perfection he expected of himself.

Was I a perfectionist? Did I work too hard? Was I setting myself up for failure? I was surprised by my mother's warning; I thought I was doing merely what I was supposed to do. I hadn't considered that there was an alternative.

At KRTV, I was assigned to anchor the weekend evening newscasts. On weekdays, I would be an all-purpose reporter, my particular beat being the county courthouse: the affairs of the county commission and the local criminal justice system. But I had an idea of something else I might do. Two months after I began working at the station, I approached Ed, the news director, with an earnest but unusual proposal: what did he think about a cameraman and me driving down to Missoula, three hours away, and spending a day with Richard Hugo, who taught at the university there? We could make a thirty-minute documentary out of it.

Ed looked at me blankly. “Who's Richard Hugo?”

“He's a poet. An important one. And he lives in Montana—we're lucky about that. He even writes about the state, about its rivers and little towns and taverns. I'd love to interview him and get a sense of his daily life.”

“Poetry? I'm not sure I see the purpose in this. Let me think about it. I'll get back to you.”

I waited and waited, imagining in the meantime how I might approach the project: maybe Hugo would let me sit in on a class or two; maybe he'd take me fishing or drinking. Spending a whole day with me, he might loosen up, let his guard down, reveal something of the inner life of a poet, let slip a few secrets about the art.

Weeks passed. I heard nothing from Ed about my idea. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed.

The next morning, Ed poked his head out of his office door. “Forhan!” he yelled, and motioned for me to come into his office. He was holding a fragment of wire copy that he had ripped from the Teletype. He gave it to me, then sat back on the edge of his desk, his hands behind his head. “Your poet's dead,” he said.

Was he grinning a little?

For the next few weeks, Ed teased me relentlessly about the Forhan jinx. Poets and I were a fatal mix. “I heard that Richard Brautigan came through town yesterday,” he'd say, “and he started to feel
really sick
.”

A few weeks later, Kevin wrote to me. He was responding to a letter in which I had praised his poetry unreservedly. “The pride is brotherly,” I had written. “The awe is not.” I had reminded him how important his writing was to me, how important it was that he keep writing.

Chris, you remember that letter you wrote? I've read it twice, once two months ago, and once again just now. I didn't want anything to do with it in the meantime, and I believe you understand why, and that you'll forgive the wait. It meant a great deal to me, more perhaps than it should have, and it came at a perfect time. The next day I made a deliberate decision about my writing, one I'd been on the verge of making for months, one I seem to have to make all over again every year or so—a choice, if you will, between cowardice and uncertainty. I always choose the latter, but it came a little early this year—thank you.

A short while before your letter arrived I heard Richard Hugo read, he was in town. Everyone commented about his sad state, his weight, his limp, his wheeze—a couple of weeks later he was dead. The last poem he recited was a new one, about trees and grass and elfin spirits and lovers, and he read it magnificently. It was one of those poems that remind you of what's possible.

What's possible:
I wanted to achieve that in poetry. But I was a TV newsman. Had I chosen cowardice over uncertainty? Had I chosen the safety of a stable, respectable career over a more meaningful life, an unpredictable but vital one devoted to art and imagination? I had chosen steady health benefits and the possibility of professional advancement—I was thinking of the future. My brother, meanwhile, was summoning up, and summing up, a past that was waiting patiently to be reckoned with:

Stranded shrub root.

Brick, ash, boot. Brick cool.

Shadow cool, palm to the fire.

Toes on the hearth. Mother,

Father. Oak twisps. Twist of smoke.

Those lines were in a poem called “Adding Up Home.” It was my home; those were my parents; the twist of smoke was mine, too—my ungraspable childhood, its ungraspable implications. And the words were my brother's.

If my mother was right, I was following my father's path of professional ambition and perfectionism and duty. I might be turning toward the world and away from myself. I might be living my father's life over again. My brother was trying to make a different kind of life, in poetry—and he was trying to make sense in it of what our father was, of what our father did.

A Strange Farewell

I wish my father had grown old,

troubled with wisdom, a bit daft, frayed

at the edge, but of use, like a patch quilt.

My father was a crazy coward,

and I won't live that life over again

but it's a strange farewell to want to live

by strength of will, and die by accident.

We all beg wisdom of the dead,

but in secret: perhaps an ambitious weakness

for saying the unsayable

is the babbling of drunks, fools, and poets.

It seems that among the living

wisdom is essentially incidental,

silence in the presence of a child,

baseball talk at a funeral,

a loving nod in that odd moment of weakness.

But I wish my father had grown old,

not perhaps fully recovered, always wearing

the same tie, occasionally ill at ease,

and babbling away.

I had been reading, still, mainly Stevens and Ashbery, and—although I would not have said so then—my own poems were intellect-driven, abstract, emotionally restrained, and generally impenetrable. I was so intent on manipulating language to make it inhabit an elaborate, projected poetic realm that I was often blind to what the language was really doing. Dana came north to visit once, and I showed her some of my poems. She had recently moved to Yuma, Arizona, her own remote small town, after marrying a marine stationed there. Like our marine father, he was smart, articulate, distant, and unyielding—Dana was only a few years away from leaving him. As she lay
on my living room carpet, scanning a new, long, allusive poem I was proud of, I awaited, in silence, her verdict. The poem was spoken by a persona, some indeterminate actor; it was called “The Last Time I Played Hamlet.” Would my sister understand the concepts the poem was contemplating, the particular rocky philosophical path the language was traveling down?

After a few minutes, she looked up. “It's true,” she said, “what you write about Dad. I've felt that way, too.”

No, no, I told her. The poem is about Hamlet, about an invented character playing Hamlet. Was she familiar with the play? The situation, I said, is all set up in the poem's first few lines:

The last time I played Hamlet

releasing the fiction of my own madness

was not enough. The ghost of my father

would not appear, no matter my rage,

and I praised my uncle's best intentions.

“The ghost of my father / would not appear.” Dana was right. The poem was not about Hamlet.

57

I felt alien in Montana and increasingly alien to broadcasting as a career, but I wasn't thinking of a way out. After all, I had enlisted. Perhaps too much like my father, I was sticking with it, buckling down, doing the work I'd signed on for, ignoring the self within me that was capable of real joy, forcing it to lie sleeping throughout the day, then coaxing it awake late at night, feeding it crumbs as I hunched over my notebook and worried out a few lines of poetry.

A year after I began working at KRTV, the other TV station in Great Falls tried to woo me away. Though I was only twenty-three and felt like an apprentice, the station manager of KFBB asked if I wouldn't like to take the next step in my career. How would I feel about being his news director? I would produce and anchor the weekday evening newscast and manage the small news department: four reporters, a weatherman, and a cameraman. The new position would come with a hefty raise: I would earn fourteen thousand dollars a year. What choice did I have? I said I was thrilled to be asked and grateful for the opportunity.

I still liked writing for television, working to craft clear—maybe even elegant—sentences that said much in few words. I liked editing stories, inventing ways for images and words and sounds to interact and make meaning. In my new job, I liked putting reports on
the air that another news director—one keener to broadcast actual news—might not have. On one slow news day, I sent a reporter out to proofread the town; he came back with pictures of ungrammatical or misspelled billboards and an interview with the county sheriff about why, on the sign outside his building, the word
sheriff
appeared in quotation marks. (“Is this an actual quote? Or are you only a hypothetical sheriff?”) I liked appearing on the air, attempting to sound genuine and to speak substantively, attempting, in my chats on the set with the sports guy or the weather reporter, to sound as if I were engaged in a real conversation.
As if:
that was the problem. I was still Bick Bark. I was pretending. With television, everything seemed a simulation, a packaging of reality, and therefore always a step removed from it. I felt myself growing loyal solely to that secondary, circumscribed reality: the newsworthy one. If a report came over the police radio of a major pile-up on the interstate, I prayed for fatalities. That would be a story we could lead with. I wanted pictures, dramatic pictures: the murder suspect, shackled, being led away to jail; flames feeding on a family's home and shooting into the night sky; a zoom-in to the widow's tearstained face. Reality on its own was not enough: what mattered was its potential as fodder for a newscast. What mattered was what I could do with it, what it could do for me. I was nurturing my glibness and cynicism, surrendering myself to a smallness of vision. If I had a soul, I was suffocating it.

Week after week, an advertisement appeared in the regional inner pages of
TV Guide
: a photo of me in my sharpest jacket and tie, posing at the anchor desk, smiling broadly, proclaiming my profound and abiding commitment to bringing the news to the people of north-central Montana.

But that guy in the tie with the pancake makeup and the fixed, sprayed hair felt more and more like someone else, someone I didn't trust. The person I trusted was the one who was already out of there,
the one who, back home in Seattle for a visit, at a party, made wistful by wine, tried to harmonize with Kevin and Dana a rendition of the Roches' song “Runs in the Family”—
One by one we left home. / We went so far out there.
 . . . The person I trusted was the one who was writing poetry—or trying to write it. I sent my attempts to Kevin, mainly so the famished half of my divided self could be nourished by the words of someone who understood, of someone who
kne
w
—words such as these that my brother sent me just when I needed them:

You clearly are a good, great enough poet to pursue the craft for your own reasons and be understood/excused by a good one out of every three thousand people, no matter what the results are. You're already (or have always been, without my realizing it) as inventive and resourceful as I am, without being as obsessively weird, which bodes well for your future as a published poet. It's inspiring to find someone close to me with a subterranean psyche. Isn't that one way of saying it? I know what the workaday world does, subverting and weakening the notion that a man's idea of what's real in the world is flexible, adaptable, liable to constant scrutiny until he becomes less himself than a part of what is already established, a cog, and if this notion of resistance has become in itself a triviality, recognized and described until it has become in itself mundane, I still believe in the power of this kind of resistance, sitting in a crowd of friends or co-workers I still feel it, nothing I've experienced can match it, and a poem can show it! That's the secret of why I've done what I've done for the last several years; my failures, at least, are my own.

We are not permitted to say these things. It's a shock to realize that our greatest thrill and accomplishment, to ourselves the most important achievement, is in this revelation of ourselves by degrees.

I see nothing but mystery everywhere. I refer to my failures
because I'm not up to my own standards. Intuition has led me to feign weakness to escape triviality. And yet triviality is real; triviality is the Devil. The Devil wins in the end. Today I went to the airport to send some seafood, air freight, to California. It's my job. And, Chris, they were mailing a body out, somewhere, on the airplane! They weighed this cardboard coffin on the scale, while I watched, to determine the shipping charges. I sneaked a peek at the airbill: the human remains, it said, of Charles H. Smith, one hundred and ninety pounds, with the cardboard. And all of us, the man from Republic Airlines who laid the body to the scale with a forklift, the funeral parlor worker who stood and whistled—I swear to you, whistled!—as the work was done, and I, waiting with my thousand pounds of freshly killed seafood for my turn at the scale, were reduced in my mind, with the picture of the fresh corpse, in the posture of sleep, impossibly vivid in my imagination, to the status of dumbfounded pallbearers, with everything held dear to ourselves in our lives made pointless and stupid by the hopelessly awkward presence of the dead man. Triviality; mystery! I must not allow the overwhelming stupidity of persons and places and things to make me insensible to that moment when everything I believe can be called into question. None of my questions has been answered.

None of my questions were being answered, either. Except. Except: I met Rebecca—an artist. An artist! A painter.
She
knew; she was aware of the enduring, unsettling, glorious mystery one could sense if only one were silent long enough to listen. When witnessing some drunken lout acting stupidly—trying to climb a telephone pole, beer can in hand, or shouting provocative inanities at a pretty woman—Rebecca had a habit of remarking sourly, “Doesn't he know he's going to die?”

She had recently earned an MFA and was making a living by teaching in the Great Falls artists-in-the-schools program. Meanwhile,
alone in the studio, she was devoting her life to her work; combining pastel drawings and glued pieces of tissue paper, she was making image after image after image of human torsos, the mindless and unmoving part of us, all inscrutable throbbing feeling. It was the fact of her being an artist, certainly, that drew me to Rebecca—and her kindness, and her beauty, which she had the habit of obscuring beneath sweatshirts and army pants. I met her first at the local arts center, where I was reporting on a story—the kind of artsy feature I preferred. I overheard her speaking seriously, unironically, to another woman about astrology. Under my breath, I said something sardonic, and Rebecca pounced. “And what's your sign?” she asked. Hearing that I was a Scorpio, she said, “I'm not surprised.” A half-serious, half-teasing debate about the merits of astrology ensued. Astrology, I proposed, is superstition. Its premise contradicts the laws of physics. And it's reductive; it pretends that life is not as bewildering as it is. No, she argued: astrology works. It has worked for thousands of years. It's mysterious but nonetheless has an internal logic—it can be a trusted guide to those who want to understand this strange, anguish-filled life.

That first conversation hinted at what was to come: a powerful and long relationship, a marriage, eventually, that lasted fifteen years but ended mainly because, regarding what mattered to us most—our sense of ultimate reality, our metaphysics—we could not converse freely and sympathetically without frustration and defensiveness and injured feelings. As our marriage progressed, instead of figuring out another, more tender and generous way to talk about it, I fell into the habit, like my father, and like myself as a child, of staying silent when I might have spoken, of trading a confrontation with a difficult truth for the relief of keeping my feelings concealed—for the relief, I told myself again and again, of keeping the peace. As the years went by, and Rebecca and I stayed together, we nurtured the artist in each other but felt an essential gap between us. We each grew lonely.

And there was this: Rebecca was not instinctively enamored of existence. She had suffered and seen suffering and was not fully persuaded that life was worth the pain. She sometimes complained that life on this planet was too cruel, too difficult. “Compared to what?” I would ask. “It's cruel, yes, but it's joyful and beautifully strange, too. Anyway, it's all we have. Shouldn't we embrace it? There's nothing else to embrace.” I was being glib, perhaps—speaking in platitudes. But I believed them. Some of the distance between Rebecca and me, I realized, was that she was drawn to death. It made a kind of sense to her as a relief from suffering. Not long after our marriage ended, I heard a poet friend and teacher of mine, Gregory Orr, speak of the trauma at the center of his own childhood: when he was twelve, on a morning hunting expedition, he shot and killed his eight-year-old brother. It was an accident. Certain that the chamber in his .22 was empty, he casually waved the rifle backward over his shoulder and fired, not seeing that the barrel was pointing at his brother. Out of the horror, guilt, self-hatred, and meaninglessness that rushed into his being, he discovered the consolation of poetry. He also discovered a fact about his father: when he was a boy, while skeet shooting, he, too, had accidentally shot and killed someone—his best friend. Although a pulled trigger scorched his life and his memory, he later, as a grown man and father, filled his house with guns and taught his own young boys to hunt. He did not speak to his children about his accidental boyhood crime, but he re-created its circumstances; he built a life in which a rifle could easily find itself in the hands of an impulsive, reckless boy. It is a common thing, probably more common than not: we never shake the essential emotional experiences of our childhood; in fact, we create a life in which we oblige ourselves to revisit them. I had always assumed that my relationships with women were somehow shadow versions of my relationship with my mother. When I heard Gregory speak, it did not seem to me that his family being traumatized by two
accidental shooting deaths was a coincidence. Instead, it struck me that his father had, perversely and unconsciously, found a way to re-create his childhood trauma, as if it were so essential to his being that he could not put it completely behind him. And another thing struck me: I had not married a version of my mother. I had married my father. I had created a circumstance in which my job was to try to persuade a person I loved that life was worth living.

But two decades before that recognition, as Rebecca and I were starting—in a series of small moves, a series of little risks—to merge our two lives together, a new way of conceiving of my life seemed possible. Unambivalently loyal to her desire to be an artist, Rebecca had gone to graduate school. Why couldn't I do the same? It was evident by now that if I were to be happy, if I were to be true to myself and not subsumed by a life I did not completely believe in, I would have to put poetry at the center of my attentions, not at their periphery. I had been letting my consciousness be shaped by television, by the tidy packagings of reality, the continual partial lies, that it required. I felt most exhilaratingly alive in the midst of writing a poem that felt true. My work in TV news could not provide such sensations. It was their enemy.

I would apply to graduate schools. I would quit my job, quit my career. Rebecca and I would marry, and, since her contract with the school district was expiring, we would move wherever I was accepted. After that, who knew where we would live or what we would do. For now, it didn't matter. What mattered was that I would devote myself solely to poetry; I would go where it led me.