Off to the Side: A Memoir

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  If Yeats never got off his stilts, at least this is an option on a poet’s path. A novelist, however, has to get down there with the raw meat on the daily floor. In the high range is the possibility I read in high school in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, “I maintain that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.” The bulk of the work is in the midrange, but the low range can be comic and bathetic. The mind is delightfully errant. Your left foot hurts, possibly because you’re a tad heavy and gravity is omnipresent. Thinking of your sore foot you feel lucky you don’t walk on your head. You don’t want to take a shower but you need one. Everything must be questioned. In the shower you want a martini and long for those fancy hotels with a phone in the bathroom where you could reach out from the shower curtain and order a martini or a fine expense-account bottle of wine. Life has been going poorly and you begin to think of it as basically aversion therapy. Perhaps in Lithuania women like burly men who have a fondness for anchovies and garlic. That sort of thing, all from the shower problem, not to speak of the complicated process of drying off.

  To write novels you have to have an attention to detail, the “textural concretia” of life, ninety-nine percent of which you will never use. You make notes, occasionally in a journal which I think of as my image bank, and sometimes in the form of faxes to friends. Over the past few years Ted Kooser and I corresponded in the form of small three- and four-line poems, which we will publish jointly with Copper Canyon Press without attribution. Early this morning I wrote a fax to my friend Dan Gerber, which I’ll keep just in case: “Up a canyon very early so Rose can avoid crotalids (rattlesnakes) because it’s getting hot. Charged by three lovely yearling horses who swirled, jumped, and farted. I was the morning’s excitement. Looked up to see a distant contrail making an abrupt U-turn. A tiny bug bit my nose tip. Rose pointed five quail who arose, desultorily. It’s their sex season. More quiet. Saw a songless vermilion flycatcher in a mesquite where last year there was a bushel-sized evening primrose. None this year because of drought. Three empty migrant water jugs. Last night the moon fluttered like a round white butterfly.”

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  I think it was Scott Fitzgerald who insisted we don’t make friends beyond early middle age. This puzzled me when I was younger, and when older I found it to be quite untrue. It occurred to me that Fitzgerald may have said it in the tertiary stage of alcoholism when absolutely everything becomes self-referential. A plane flies over at thirty-five thousand feet and a man looks up and says, “What’s this got to do with me?” An alcoholic in Michigan is resentful about September 11 because it detracts from possible sympathy about his problems, largely unworded.

  Friends made in middle age seem to have a basis in mutual curiosity, where old friends are glued together by their anguishes, small triumphs, a lineage of travel, or hot afternoons and cool evenings when they did nothing whatsoever except be companionable. With Guy de la Valdéne, Bob Dattila, Jack Nicholson, Tom McGuane, Russell Chatham, my farm neighbor Nick Reens, Pat Paton or Mike Ballard in the Upper Peninsula, or Peter Matthiessen when we fish in Montana in September, we merely begin the conversation where we left off the last time. With Gérard Oberlé in France, Fred Turner in New Mexico, Peter Lewis in Seattle, it is all literature and food though I first met Peter Lewis twenty-five years ago when he was trying to help my friend Richard Brautigan survive. With some friends the mutual obsession is literary, also an aversion to shop talk: Eliot Weinberger, Robert DeMott, Doug Stanton, Jeffrey Lent, Colum McCann, J. Fier, Terry Schlais, George Quasha, Robert Alexander, Sam Hamill, Joseph Bednarik. I keep returning to Nebraska where I see Ted Kooser, the folk historian John Carter who helped me so much on research, Roger Welsch, Beef Torrey, and Bill Quigley up in Valentine in the Sandhills. There are also near misses because of time and distance and lives dense with work: Elmore Leonard, Mario Batali, Gary Snyder and Hayden Carruth, David Quammen, Timothy Ferris, Will Hearst. And certain long- and short-term friends fit into no category: Chuck Bowden, Jimmy Buffett, Peter Phinny, Terry McDonell, Bill Holm, Douglas Peacock, Jack Turner, Dan Lahren, Jimmy Fergus, my son-in-law Stephen Potenberg. I know I have forgotten some obvious ones but then my “senior moment” has been going on for several years. By contrast I decided not to list my central female friends because it might be misunderstood, perhaps purposely, by husbands and boyfriends. It takes years for a male to accumulate discretion and I don’t want to discard my own small measure.

  The list seems long but I’ve always been fairly energetic and intensely curious about how certain people lead their lives which is, after all, the basis of friendship. I’ve never quite known how to classify my twenty-five year relationship with Lawrence Sullivan, which is half professional wherein he throws me a rope to pull me out of holes I’ve dug and fallen into, and the other half is about food, books, family, the world at large.

  Unlike the sciences literature is only slightly cumulative and this in the misty area of influences, also the historical rendering of phases, periods, fads, and movements where too much is made of the vaguest of contiguities. In a novel everything must be freshly brought into question with the novelist pretending that the world has been previously undescribed. In a memoir, however, a writer is less likely to make a case for his own unvarnished propensity for the varieties of truth. There’s nothing more wildly comic, if you remove yourself far enough, than sex in a nontraditional society where some writers describe intercourse in semiliturgical terms, and our sexualities are expected to fill the lacunae left by a God who is said to have disappeared quite some time ago.

  All privacy is brought into question but not by my family and many others. I’ve often thought my wife and daughters, Jamie and Anna, got their sense of decorum from my father-in-law, William Ludlow King, who though not snobbish was unyieldingly high-minded like his grandfather in Legends of the Fall. My own mother when I wasn’t all that old was disgusted when her Swedish icon Ingrid Bergman was flayed by the press on running off with Roberto Rossellini. Norma Olivia Walgren Harrison certainly didn’t condone adultery but she was appalled by media snooping in the underwear drawer. When I told my daughters that I was writing a memoir they fairly recoiled, and I countered teasingly that maybe I could send them to Europe the first two months after publication, a bribe offer that was considered pathetic. A month later I got the backhand permission, “Go ahead. You have to be honest.” Of course I do but I wouldn’t think it worth reading if Richard Nixon had had a long affair with Henry Kissinger. There are any number of good reasons to write about sexuality in a memoir when it’s au point, such as in Mary Karr’s splendid The Liars’ Club, where her early experiences were raw and lucid and obviously had a part in forming her life. I’m pretty good at recovering memory but I don’t recall anything similar in my own life. When we were mutually short-funded a few weeks ago my writer friend Charles Bowden and I mourned the fact that we had no evil priests in our past. I clearly remember the affectionate nature of certain Boy Scout leaders and maybe the lawyers will head for that area next.

  The other day when I had begun to make notes about marriage and my immediate family, Linda and I nearly lost our home to a brush and forest fire that was stopped within fifty yards of our casita. A half-dozen local fire departments arrived in the area, helicopters released huge buckets of water, and other planes dropped dense clouds of pinkish-red fire retardant. It was a little dicey for twelve hours. We packed a few necessities including paintings and manuscripts, our prescriptions and my upper plate, a minimal amount of clothing, and, most important of all, the dogs. I was especially impressed by a young crew from the National Forest Service who cut the fence that crossed our creek, chain-sawed trees, and approached the fire directly, all in minutes. They seemed superlative athletes in a terrifying game.

  It was especially upsetting because the closing on the sale of our home in Michigan was today and if we had lost the casita we would have been implausibly homeless. It’s hard to count the one-room cabin in the Upper P
eninsula which I find appealing but wouldn’t do as a home. Most years because of the snow it’s hard to approach until late April and you have to be out of there by mid-November. We’ve had the farm, though it has grown in size, for thirty-three years, but then the area has changed radically in that time from agrarian and commercial fishing to summer homes for the wealthy. This alone wouldn’t have driven me away from the beauty of the area but a year ago when Linda, Jamie, and Anna went to England and Ireland together and the decision was made. At heart the move was planned out of loneliness for our daughters and grandchildren who live in Montana for the specific reason that that’s where they vacationed as children, essentially the same ambience I was after when I found the U.P. cabin. Why not try to live, if possible, where you felt happiest and most free? McGuane was a little cynical when I told him the news in that we’d been talking about a move to Montana since 1968.

  Living in Michigan and Arizona we saw our daughters and grandchildren only twice a year, on the September fishing visit in Montana and when they’d come to Patagonia in the winter to escape the cold. In some years there were summer Michigan visits but I sensed they were made without great enthusiasm. We’re building a small house in Montana and hope to have enough sense to be unobtrusive the half year we’re there. On my rather single-minded and obsessive arc as a writer in these later years I am more advised than I am offering advice to my daughters. I’m far from a Dagwood type but since they were about fourteen I’ve been a little timid about crossing their honest natures. McGuane once said about women, not totally in jest, “They all know we’re assholes.”

  I mostly look forward to taking my grandsons, Will and John Christian, fishing when they feel up to going. When my daughters were in their late teens and early twenties I drove both of them quite batty with my fears for their safety. It was an illusion of control that they both ignored and defied, whether it was my insistence that when Jamie lived in New York City she have an apartment with a doorman, or when Anna was on one of her frequent car trips I had asked her to call me every evening. No way, as they say. Jamie has published three mystery novels so far dealing with Montana, and has recently finished a fourth set in New York City. Anna works at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, after doing her training at Horizon Books in Traverse City, Michigan. Jamie’s husband, Stephen, is a lawyer. They live a bit close to the bone because Montana isn’t a litigious state. Anna lives with Max Hjortsberg, the son of an old friend and novelist, William Hjortsberg, after her first brief marriage to Matt Kapsner, a young novelist. My own marriage moves along fairly well as it should after over forty years of experience. Our only wars are Monday-night pasta wars when we make separate sauces. Our last major quarrel several years back was resolved when I had the bright idea of going into the front yard and throwing eggs at a large boulder. It was a very satisfying way to settle a quarrel and I recommend it to all of those experiencing marital spats.

  My mother died in December 2000, which cut another tie to Michigan. Now only my sister Mary lives there with her husband, Nick, both social workers. My brother David lives with his wife Cindy on Bainbridge Island near Seattle where he is an aide to the new senator from Washington State, Maria Cantwell. My older brother John retired as dean of the libraries at University of Arkansas and now cooks and listens to his collection of thousands of operas full-time. His wife Rebecca writes poetry and children’s books.

  I visited my mother the November before she died and we drove for several hours on country roads that I hadn’t seen for half a century but clearly remembered. She was a woman of maddening frugality and lived in a small house in a thicket on what little remained of her family’s farm. Soon after my father and sister died in 1961 she had planted twenty acres with over seventy kinds of shrubs and trees. It was a magnificent thicket of the kind I favor myself, dense with bird and animal life and a small murky pond. When I arrived that November I poured out a half-empty bottle of wine I had given her months before. “Are you sure it isn’t good?” she asked. When we had bought her a new car several years before she pointed out that she didn’t need a car with a radio, and nothing I said could justify the radio’s presence. She was a consummate self-taught naturalist and bird-watcher and still camped with her friends well into her seventies on their bird-watching trips throughout the United States. When she died she was facing double knee and hip surgery, which I doubted she would have survived at eighty-four, but then it was her insistent announcement that she didn’t wish to live unless she could walk properly in the fields and woods. I had to humor her when she asked if she had been an encouragement to my writing. She wasn’t particularly because though she had a large intellectual capacity—our last quarrel had been about the character of Kolya in The Brothers Karamazov— she was of a practical frame of mind, doubtless from her impoverished childhood. I told her that my work would have been impossible without her, and we both ignored the possibly silly backspin of this comment. I never could understand why James Joyce wouldn’t pray with his mother. I have knelt and prayed with Lulu Peyraud in France at the grave of her husband, Lucien. I had to watch closely to see that I crossed myself properly. I’d pray with £iny old lady who asked. Why not? At the very least it demonstrates a reverence for life which I trust can be found in my work. After our mother died my sister sent me a long poem that my mother had written and hadn’t wanted me to see. It was an improbably detailed poem about what she loved about life.

  I don’t ask myself if I did what I set out to do. The calling was for a life and the junctures between one work and another were often not that explicit, the future only an abstraction we pull ourselves toward with, once again, the false geometry of days and nights, months and years, an illusion in the face of the continuum that makes up our lives. I’m unsure about the character of ambition. As a young writer I wanted to be well reviewed by Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, and Malcolm Cowley but then they were gone before I was truly started. Ambition always reminds me of a dark time during which I’d walk my yellow Labrador Sand (for Sandringham in England where she was born) on the miles of deserted beach near our farm. Sand would chase the shadows of butterflies on the beach, scarcely ever the butterfly itself. Ambition for the breadth and resonance of the work itself is appropriate but words like “victory” or “triumph” or even “success” seem better attached to elections, wars, or sporting contests. Every writer knows that nearly all of us disappear in the mordant collapse of our own generations. And I was slow to learn when younger that literary biographies lead us astray. William Faulkner was never “William Faulkner” to William Faulkner. What we think of as William Faulkner is an accretion of biographical details, not a little gossip, the specific arc and span of his work. We are privy finally to collective details and speculations that are quite aside from the life the man lived.

  What I will miss in Michigan is the morning when a blue heron walked up our steps and down the sidewalk where it looked into the oval window of our front door. This is unlikely to happen in Montana but then it was very unlikely to happen in Michigan again. It was especially vivid because that morning I had been thinking again and making notes on the fact that in our evolutionary curve painful events are most memorable. We survive by learning from pain. This fact can easily be allowed to distort anyone’s vision including a writer’s. Once at a Westwood, California, newsstand I wrote down a précis of an article in Scientific American, “Hell’s Cells. Miles underground, despite scorching heat, life thrives inside solid rock.” What a descriptive metaphor, not only for rare bacteria but also for many lives. No wonder that so much work is the shyest literary pornography. Peek your face into certain areas of this planet and it’s likely to be burned off. I keep thinking of two of Rilke’s contentions: “The exposed heart is richest in suffering,” but then comes “There’s a point at which the exposed heart never recovers.”

  Easter eve in Patagonia and waiting for a full moon to rise at about ten o’clock, a hint of ruddy air in the first glow from the dust and forest-fire smoke in th
e air. Bright stars are there when your eyes adjust to the darkness. There are two observatories in the area because of the relatively clear air and lack of ambient light. Years ago when Peter Matthiessen was down here and we were studying the sky late at night with Fred Turner, Matthiessen said, “These are the stars of my childhood.” I’ve always loved Lorca’s line “The enormous night straining her waist against the Milky Way.” A large image indeed.

  I can readily imagine sixty years ago two little boys in the bathtub in a village in northern Michigan, probably fighting on the eve of the holy Sunday, perhaps wondering what the word “rotogravure” meant in the popular Easter Sunday song, or trying to imagine a big parade to be seen in next week’s Life magazine down the famed Fifth Avenue, though up here the ground is still too frozen to make holes to play marbles, and the ice on the local lakes has withdrawn toward the shoreline where it’s thickest. The first robin may have appeared but that is less meaningful than the wild geese returning from their trip south. Sixty years later life can seem like a long marriage of a poor-sighted man to someone he never quite knew in a full sense.