The Lost Landscape (24 page)

I can't fail, I must succeed
. Like deranged Muzak this mantra ran through my head.
Can't fail. Must succeed. Can't. Must. How? Why?

“I'M ASKING MYSELF–WHY ARE
we
here?
Not one page I've read has come to mean a thing.”

The student of literature is a soul-searcher in a way that, we can assume, the student of electrical engineering or economics is not. The student of literature is a pilgrim. We yearn to be suffused with holiness. But in graduate school, life had become for us a swift current bearing us onward, blindly, out of our control.
This is not what we'd wanted. This is not what we'd expected.

Marianna began to speak often of home. Often, of her fiancé whose name was quaintly decorous as “Marianna Mason Churchland.”

Marianna warned me to be cautious when I entered her room—“I've broken some glass in here. I tried to sweep it up but there may be some sharp pieces remaining.”

Or, Marianna warned me that there was a “strange, choking-kind” of smell in her room, coming from a vent in the ceiling she wasn't able to shut.

Though her eyes were frightened behind her tortoiseshell glasses, Marianna laughed a beautiful wind chime sort of laugh. Beneath the sweetly mellifluous North Carolina accent was the breathlessness of dread.

The brilliant schoolgirl, the favorite daughter of her elders, the all-A student primed from kindergarten to succeed is not unlike a Thoroughbred horse trained to jump obstacles, and with each success the bar is raised; eventually, the horse must fail, or must fall and break one of her beautiful slender legs—so I thought, observing Marianna who seemed to be having the difficulties I was having in adjusting to graduate school as well as some sort of (unspecified) difficulty with her family or with her fiancé (for Marianna was often on the phone downstairs) and who was willing to speak of her disillusion with her courses and professors more readily than I was.

“I almost can't believe—I used to
love reading
. Now, I'm getting to
hate it
. Some nights I can
hardly sit still to concentrate.
”

It's with a fond memory, or rather a bittersweet memory, that I recall our much-admired professor Helen White advising her seminar students that the way she'd dealt with the massive readings assigned in graduate school at Harvard was to “lay out on my bed all the books that had to be read or consulted”—and not go to bed until her work was completed.

Excellent advice? Not-so-excellent advice? For those of us inclined to insomnia in any case, it was at least heartfelt advice.

AMID THE PRESSURE OF
academic work it happened that something unexpected and benevolent occurred in my beleaguered life: I, too, fairly suddenly acquired a fiancé.

A young Ph.D. candidate in English literature (field of research eighteenth century; from Milwaukee) and I met on October 23, 1960, in the Memorial Union at Madison, at a Sunday afternoon graduate students' reception. It was the only such social occasion I'd attended, overwhelmed with work as I was; a measure of my desperation, that I'd dared to detach myself from my cell of a room in Barnard Hall.

At this graduate reception, an “older man”—(Ray was twenty-nine)—approached me, and asked if anyone was sitting in the chair beside me.

Soon, it developed that this person, Ray Smith, was not only “older” but far more experienced in the labyrinthine ways of the English graduate program; and he was delighted to give me advice, and to speak with me at length about the remarkable, if also formidable literary-historical works I was obliged to read. That evening, following the reception, we had dinner together in the student union
overlooking Lake Mendota—the first meal together of countless thousands in the more than four decades to come.

I have written of Ray elsewhere—at length, in
A Widow's Story
. A memoir of a death is an attempt to commemorate the living being, who has passed into “death.” But it is not an attempt, usually, that succeeds in evoking anything of the fleeting, thrilling, elusive, essentially unsayable impressions that pass between individuals, rarely just words, but rather mannerisms—facial, expressive, part-conscious. There is the mystery of
touch, touching
. Impossible to convey.

I am sorry, but I am not able to write about Ray here. I have tried—but it is just too painful, and too difficult. Words are like wild birds—they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.

Even if you hear their cries at a distance, you cannot summon them. You will only exhaust yourself in the effort, and the quixotic project of
writing a memoir decades after living the life
will come to an abrupt end.

Raymond Joseph Smith and I would become engaged on November 23, 1960; we would be married on January 23, 1961. (Ray's parents came from Milwaukee for the small wedding, for it was a short drive to Madison. My parents did not attend, perhaps because they didn't feel that they could afford plane travel, and certainly they could not have left my sister Lynn behind, or in anyone's care.)

I had not thought that I would ever be married. Vaguely I retained an ideal, or an image, of being a “teacher”—based upon Mrs. Dietz, of my old one-room school. And though Mrs. Dietz was obviously a married woman, she did not exude any wifely air, or even any clearly defined sexual air. She had always seemed, amid the schoolchildren, of whom a number were hardly “children” but precociously mature young adults, essentially alone, stalwart in her authority.

And yet, I had become married. I was deeply in love, and a little frightened of my new state, in which suddenly one “cares for”
another as one “cares for” oneself—yet the other is not always predictable. (Is he?)

Soon you realize that your fears for yourself are now doubled—you will fear for the other, too.
His
happiness,
his
well-being.
His
career.

Nonetheless, it was certainly the case that I could be defined as
happy.

In some quarters, observed by my Barnard Hall neighbors and friends,
very happy.

And yet, inwardly, simultaneously, contrary to Aristotle's logic that one cannot be X and non-X at the same time, in the interstices of happiness,
very unhappy.

Or rather,
distracted, distressed. Uncertain. Overwhelmed.

In the decades following 1960 to 1961 the confessional mode has become a predominant literary genre. As a writer I have not been drawn to what is called memoirist prose because I have never felt that my life could be nearly as interesting as what my imagination could make of another's life; whatever my “story” is, it is not compelling set beside others' stories, including those of my parents and my grandparents and others of their generations who have lived, it had always seemed to me, a life closer to the bone than their children and grandchildren. (In my single novel that suggests memoirist fiction,
I'll Take You There
, only the setting, Syracuse University, is “real.” The young woman undergraduate protagonist, unnamed, does not share the author's biography and is not the author but a means of writing about an intensely observed experience of a certain time and place. Yet she is obviously closer to me than any twin sister!) And I know that the “confessed” is a text; a text is language artfully arranged; language artfully arranged is not authentic; the not-authentic is not the aim of the serious confession. The vogue of seemingly sensational confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s was a dramatic reaction
against the airless, stiffly impersonal, acrostics-poetry being written at that time, under the influence of (Anglican) T. S. Eliot who decreed that poetry should be impersonal, a matter of elite cultural allusions and symbols, never a
cri de coeur
. No Shelley, no Whitman, no D. H. Lawrence! Indeed, no Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats! With the eruption of the Beats into American culture at mid-century the old way of poetry was overcome as by rabble cheerfully beating down palace gates, and poetry would never be the same again. Fortunately! But the new, seemingly raw mode of self-expression imposes its own conventions on practitioners who may feel compelled to be radical, sensational, merciless, and unsparing in their exploitation of themselves and others. (Think of the preeminent Establishment poet of his time, Robert Lowell, appropriating the intimate, candid, pleading letters of his former wife Elizabeth Hardwick for his poetry: “Why not say what happened?” is Lowell's apologia.) When our experience doesn't match the high stakes of self-expression, ever ratcheted upward, experience has to be falsified; the remainder of life, the unsensational, the quotidian, the quiet, the sentimental and tender and obvious, has to be denied. For these reasons, as well as for reasons of personal/familial reticence, until
A Widow's Story
(2011), I did not write about my private life; my intensely personal life; I did not write “thinly disguised fiction” or outright memoir about my husband Raymond Smith, my marriage, the initial experience of
falling in love;
never have I attempted to record the minutiae, the daily-ness, of an intimate companionate life. It is enough to state that I met by chance, at a Sunday afternoon reception for graduate students in the student union at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the individual who would so alter my life as to seem to revise my very history so that there is the
life leading up to
and the
life subsequent.

Of our hurts and bafflements we create monuments to survival;
of our good choices, and our good luck, we are obliged to remain silent. We dare not speak for another, and it is always wrong to expose intimacy even in the celebration of intimacy.

AND THEN, AMID A
time of happiness, my body began to break down.

A sudden attack of tachycardia in my room late one night when I was reading and annotating John Lyly's
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
(1578)—a Renaissance text of such Herculean dullness it must be read to be believed but who would wish to read it, except under duress? Suddenly, a kind of clamp shut over my heart, and opened again, propelling my heartbeat into a rapid hammering that made my chest vibrate visibly, and sucked away my breath. What had happened? Why? So swiftly, without warning? It was as if a switch had been pulled, and suddenly—I was helpless.

Tachycardia pulls blood from finger- and toe-tips so that you begin to feel the chill (of impending death?)—like Socrates observing the chill of death rising in his legs, in Plato's
Phaedo
. I was twenty-two—I was alone in my room in Barnard Hall—my first thought was that I did not want my fiancé to know about this attack—really, I did not want anyone to know. Though having difficulty breathing and in terror that I would die I was not able to lie down on my bed—the hammering heartbeat is unbearable in such a position—and even sitting still at my desk became unbearable; so in a kind of trance, shivering, trembling, very cold and yet beginning to sweat, I made my way slowly—very slowly—out into the corridor.

There was no one to witness. Some doors down was Marianna's room, and a light shone beneath her door; but I did not want to alarm Marianna who had health issues of her own, and I did not want to reveal my weakness to Marianna who thought of me as a “beacon of sanity” (Marianna's lightly ironic words). Other doors, shut, with
no light shining beneath, held no appeal for me—I could not bring myself to knock, to beg for help.

(Isolated incidents of health crises occurred in Barnard Hall not infrequently. There was a young woman mathematician who'd fainted after returning from a meal, falling heavily just in front of her room; several of us had tried to help her but she'd begun sobbing hysterically, and had repelled our offers of comfort. Another young woman, a mutual friend of Marianna's and mine, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, very thin, dangerously thin, who wore white short-sleeved blouses even in cold weather of a gauzy near-transparent material that allowed the pained observer to see how skeletal she'd become, had fainting spells, and spells of weeping; vividly I recall this young woman's pale freckled face, pale red very short hair, damp eyes as she spoke of her work as a lab assistant for an experimental cognitive psychologist who was also her advisor.)

In the corridor for some reason I made my way with painstaking slowness, a small step at a time, and leaning against the wall, and so to the stairs; and down two flights of stairs to check, bizarrely, my mailbox into which some flyers had been shoved. (I might have called my fiancé from the phone room off the foyer but I was determined not to worry him, as I was determined not to allow him to know that I was so stricken.) At the front door of the residence I stood and breathed in the freezing-cold air; I observed a few vehicles on University Avenue, and wondered wanly who was inside, who those strangers were, whose hearts did not threaten to explode inside their chests; I thought of my younger, lost self who'd slipped from her room in the old farmhouse on Transit Road, standing in a trance of oblivion at the side of the road, like a creature who has been drawn to a vision for which there is no name, no comprehension. I did not want to think that, in my secrecy, in my wish not to alarm or inconvenience others, I had (inadvertently, unhappily)
caused a shock in my parents' lives: for I had telephoned home one night, calling collect, after 11:00
P.M
., as instructed, to tell my parents that I was
engaged to be married;
I had not told them that I was seeing anyone, still less that I had
fallen in love;
for our family reticence would have forbidden the divulgence of such information, until it was absolutely necessary.

I even had an engagement ring of my own now. A very small diamond in a white-gold setting. My parents had been too surprised by my news to have thought to ask if I had an engagement ring, nor had I thought to tell them. But I wore the ring proudly, as if it were proof of—what? Normality?