What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
— William Carlos Williams
Stepping off the plane I am shocked to find that I remember this place, though I have never been here before. I remember clearly being a child, walking through a forest of small oaks, carrying a metal box of cinders to keep warm, with a woman who is my mother. She is not my Paterson mother, but another mother. I remember the war. There are terrible things, there are wondrous things outside the reach of my recollection, my consciousness, that are suddenly set into motion here. I, as a result, acquire a false sense of security, of belonging, of fluency. I am born for a second time into a different and distant home — a home from long ago. And I am filled with longing and unfinished things, and I feel unspeakable pain and sorrow at this intimation of a home which perhaps never existed and which I have been separated from, severed from until now. What else eludes me, I wonder, slips away? What else goes unremembered? I am bereft. A home I have been separated from and have forgotten and yet has haunted me. I have written about it from the start… France.
I think of all the things that are outside the range of our memories or imaginations or intelligence or talent — it’s the place I suspect which is our true home. If we could get there we would finally feel okay. But we can’t. We are all homeless, groping, roaming in the darkness, aware of only a fraction of it.
But I am delighted and in great awe over the resonances I can perceive. And the repetitions. At the Karolyi Foundation in the form of two extraordinary women, Judith Karolyi and Zenka Bartek, the reiteration again comes of who I am and why I live. I am reminded again of what I must do. It comes through with great force and clarity. They press me on, they press me further. I have stepped off the plane and into the care of these two women, lovers, both in their seventies, who offer me, like guardians at the doors of the psyche, fearlessness, diabolic and sometimes harsh judgments, support, and after awhile unconditional love. And they watch me unravel, as I will in the next months, and they will stand by and they will watch out for me, protect me, wait for me — as I too wait. Until I can take the vow again — having gone a long way off.
And in the New York I inhabited and left in 1988, my publishing house closes, and Helen, tired of all the separations, tired of all my antics, goes off with another woman, and I become lost. Almost irretrievably. I had left her again. Because I had to. But she was tired, bitter, lonely. Fed up finally.
I had left her behind, again — because I could not write — write, that is, on my own terms, without concern for the marketplace, without selling out in small but grave ways: writing for magazines, or teaching prematurely, or making unconscious decisions that might make the work more sexy, more accessible — but for all the wrong reasons. It seemed crucial not to derail myself now, not to subvert myself, not to give in. But she is less and less capable of understanding all this, or caring.
I was too afraid of not allowing my talent, my potential, to go where it needed to go.
I begin, as I often have, a long series of affairs. Because the body all along has been a kind of home to me. But I am sad, and deranged, and so far away. And I miss New York, and I miss her, but there’s no place for me there, and no way I can afford to continue writing.
And I write down what happens because it is the only way I know to do. I write it all down, and eventually even it takes on the glow of the imagination, freeing itself from the known world. And I give it in the end a title of dislocation, my novel of France. I call it The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. I return to New York; I return to France. At some point Helen and I are reunited. I go back to France a third time. I am writing a wild, visionary thing, The Bay of Angels—but my precious time doesn’t last, can’t last.
AMERICA 1995
This country is not a home to me. I am tired of the America that has increasingly come to mean selfishness and avarice and cruelty and meanness of spirit. I have had it for good this time with the Republicans. I am disgusted by an America that loathes difference, otherness. An America indifferent to beauty. A country hostile to art and to its artists — and to all that makes life worth living in the first place. Ruskin wrote, “Great nations write their deeds in art.” We are lost, violently blinded, bankrupt. The children are hungry, the elderly are frightened, the mentally ill wander the streets. Whose family values are these? If it were not for the handful of people I love too much, I would have found a way out of here by now.
I am leaving out many of my moves at this stage, many changes of address; I tire. Other temporary residencies: Park Slope; Washington, D.C.; Normal, Illinois. In four years, I will teach in four schools; I despair. I am tired of roaming, exhausted, depleted. About to give up.
HOUSE
It is a quiet September evening when the phone rings, and as in a movie or a dream, the world changes in an instant. Various people on the unreal speaker-phone saying “fiction,” “prize,” “fellowship.” It’s the Lannan Foundation, audacious angels from Los Angeles. “Fifty thousand dollars.” Impossible. Awards like this one, when they come, arrive like blizzards or love, seemingly out of nowhere, a kind of grace. Such gifts open a whole new realm of imagining. They give the recipient an audacity of purpose, alter previous self-conceptions, make the impossible suddenly possible again: house.
That I found the house with ease surprised no one; it was, of course waiting for me — an 1840 white eyebrow colonial, in the enchanted, beguiling Hudson Valley. It had everything: a pond, a smokehouse, a bank of lilies; it was not hard to recognize. Nor was the ghost of the woman who greeted me when I opened the door. Her joie de vivre, her intelligence, her wit, a spirit present through the presence of possessions. A Chinese scroll, a clay bird, a chaise lounge, and in the closet Christmas ornaments, a kitty-litter box. A dulcimer, a violin in an unopened violin case — the house had been filled with music… Schubert on the record player.
I leave her there in winter and begin the long ordeal of securing a mortgage. The mortgage broker wonders with some exasperation who will give me a loan as he examines my “unorthodox employment history,” my living from one grant to the next, a visiting professorship here or there — and me like a child holding my one golden egg with pride. “It doesn’t look very good,” he says, as snow continues to fall. I dream of lilacs and mountains and Chinese scrolls and snow all jumbled up. I cling to these things in sleep: the body of a violin shaped like a small, insistent woman or the rowboat’s shape next to the pond. Having let in the possibility of house, I cannot bear to be houseless again — and without her. But all winter I cannot see it; there’s too much snow and the house seems suddenly to disappear as fast as it appeared. But Elizabeth is fierce: “Don’t be silly,” she whispers, “it’s yours now. You deserve it.” And she passes me a ring of shining keys. She’s handing them to me because it’s the end of her time here — and the beginning of mine.
I’d like to sit with her for a minute, safe within the sanctuary of our study, the lilacs like an ocean in the distance, and just talk, the way you can with those you genuinely admire but don’t really know. I would like to whisper my fears to her, tell her I dread the impending publication of The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Tell her I fear the person I was when I wrote it and know, on any day waking, I might be again. Almost everyone else is less patient with this sort of thing. They just want you to get on with it — enjoy your successes, don’t worry so much about the past. But she’s more understanding. This time around at any rate. I am afraid of the person I was then, so resigned, so desirous of death, I’d tell her. And I imagine she’d say, “I, too, was afraid at times.”