The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My normally even-mannered husband was astonished at such a gesture. How could I have done such a thing, after having worked so hard? What if my grade hadn’t been entered, and Clark wanted to see the paper again?

  I could not even contemplate this possibility. I had no idea why I hadn’t made a carbon copy, either.

  The master’s oral exam ended. I was invited to leave the room, and to wait outside while the committee deliberated. My husband Ray was lurking somewhere in the English Department but I had asked him not to wait with me; not to be seen with me; afterward, I would seek him out, and that would be soon enough.

  After a brief consultation during which time I waited in the hallway in a state of apprehension, knowing beforehand that the verdict would not be cause for euphoria, yet not wanting to think the worst, the senior member of the committee called me inside to inform me that “Joyce Carol Smith” would be granted a master’s degree in English and American literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; but “Joyce Carol Smith” was not recommended to continue Ph.D. studies at Madison. The verdict was You are not to be one of us.

  It is true that I felt relief, but disappointment as well. It is always painful to be rejected even by those by whom we would not really wish to be accepted.

  When I went to seek out my husband, trying to smile, and trying also not to cry, Ray said with more vehemence than I could feel for myself: “You didn’t want a Ph.D. anyway. Now you can write.”

  A QUARTER CENTURY LATER—(this is the great power of prose, that one can simply type A quarter century later and as in Alice’s Wonderland we are catapulted there)—I was invited to return to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to be given an “honorary doctorate of humane letters” at an elaborate commencement ceremony. On this return to Madison in the spring of 1985 I went alone, without my husband; the experience was surreal, though not nightmare-surreal. Throughout my stay I was haunted by the irony of the situation, and the perversity, hearing the name “Joyce Carol Oates” intoned amid those of other “distinguished alumni” of the university: not that I was an imposter exactly, for I did indeed have a master’s degree in English and American literature from Madison, but rather that, if I had not been rejected as a Ph.D. candidate in 1961, if, instead, my examiners had urged me to continue with graduate work, I might have succumbed to the temptation; if I’d been a young man for instance, of equal talent; I might have refashioned myself into another person, a professional academic, and I certainly would not have written the books I’d written, and wouldn’t as a consequence have been invited back to Wisconsin to be honored. The paradox was not one that might be elevated to a principle for others: to be accepted by my elders in one decade, I’d been required to be repudiated by my elders in an earlier decade.

  Still later, in September 1999, I would compose an outline of this memoirist piece in a room at the Edgewater Inn in Madison, overlooking a rain-lashed Lake Mendota; I would be forced to recall the bittersweet irony of my situation once again. For here I was, the “nighthawk” of a bygone era, still alive, as in a picaresque novel! Another time I’d been invited back to Madison to give a public reading, this time in the beautiful Elvehjem Museum of Art (since renamed the Chazen Museum of Art) and to be honored at an elaborate dinner with the university chancellor, his wife, and a gathering of the university community. Honored at the age of sixty-one as a (circuitous, serendipitous) consequence of having failed at the age of twenty-two! I love it that our lives are not so crudely determined as some might wish them to be, but that we appear, and reappear, and again reappear, as unpredictably to ourselves as to those who would wish to oppress us.

  I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.

  Staring at the waves of Lake Mendota, where Ray and I had sometimes taken out a rowboat, I see that there is again a mist over the choppy water. I want to contemplate this moment, and not relinquish it too soon: that we are not absolutely determined by even crucial events in our lives; an initial failure may release us to a new, more appropriate, and even more challenging course of action. We have the power to redefine ourselves, to heal our wounds, to “be secret and take defeat” (W. B. Yeats) and re-emerge; like Henry James who had failed so ignominiously, and publicly, as a playwright in London, literally booed off the stage, yet bravely vowing in his journal, “I take up my own old pen again—the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself—today—I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”

  In Madison, I have been made to feel at last that I do belong. I have arrived at an age when, if someone welcomes you, you don’t question the motives. You don’t question your own motives. Rejoice, and give thanks.

  Of our wounds we fashion monuments of survival. If we survive.

  A FRAGMENTARY MEMOIR OF a lost time. A time of apprehension, a time of (near)-dissolution; hearing the nighthawk’s beating wings, and not succumbing. For I’d become a kind of nighthawk myself, and I had persevered.

  Our lost selves are not really accessible. Our memories are fabrications, however well-intentioned. And so the effort turns upon itself like a Möbius strip, shrinking from its primary subject. I have been paralyzed by the taboo of violating the privacy of persons close to me and by the taboo, which seems a lesser one, of violating my own self; exposing my very heart, vulnerable and pulsing with life. There are intimacies, secrets, epiphanies and revelations and matters of historic fact of which I will never speak, much less write.

  Yes, I did hear from my lost friend Marianna, a few years later, after I’d begun to publish my first books. After her abrupt departure from Madison, Marianna was living with her mother in their small hometown in North Carolina. She had not married her fiancé, evidently. She had not completed her courses at Madison, she had not earned a master’s degree there but at a North Carolina college where she was now teaching. She had met “Ray Smith” (as she recalled him) a few times, and she knew that we were married. She asked after Ray, and after me. She asked me to please write back, and so I did—and never heard from her again.

  And now I am thinking of that Sunday afternoon, October 23, 1960. I had come alone to a Graduate Students’ Association reception in the Memorial Union overlooking this same lake, these waves, not far from where I am sitting, composing these words. I had come to that reception as a break from the obsessiveness of my reading. As a desperate plunge, to discover something outside my head. As a solace, for being unable to write. I knew no one, or nearly. I was one of several thousand graduate students at the university, and perhaps fifty had turned out for this reception; I was seated at a large, round, wooden table with a half-dozen others, their faces now forgotten, their names never known, and in the corner of my eye I saw, or believed that I saw, a figure approaching me. Or, approaching the table. I have no memory of myself that day except that I was likely to be dreamy-eyed, after insomniac nights in succession; I was listening to the conversation at the table without joining in, for I was too shy to join in; I would wait for someone to turn to me, to speak to me; I would not glance around with a bright hopeful smile at this person who was coming near, looming now above me. In one of my own works of fiction such a figure in the periphery of a young woman’s vision, undefined, unbidden, mysterious, might turn out to be Death—but this was not fiction, this was my life.

  Still, I didn’t glance around. Until, when a man asked if he might join me, and pulled out a chair to sit beside me, I did, and lifted my eyes to his face.

  II

  DETROIT: LOST CITY 1962–1968

  WE WERE SO HAPPY there, why did we ever leave?

  THOSE STREETS, ROADS, EXPRESSWAYS. Those years.

  Livernois. Gratiot. Grand River. Outer Drive. Telegraph. Michigan. Cass. 2nd. 3rd. 12th. Woodward. Jefferson. Vernor. Fort. Jos. Campau. Dequindre. Warren. Hancock. Beaubien. Brush. Freud. Randolph. Eight Mile. Six Mile. Shelby. Rouge. Faust. John R
.

  Motor City USA. Murder City USA.

  Inside the city limits at Eight Mile and Woodward, the heartbeat quickens. Ceaseless motion, accelerated motion, the pulse of the city. The beat. The beat. The city of romance, wonder. The city of apprehension. The city not-knowing how its future is already receding like lights in a rearview mirror.

  HAZY SKYLINES. CHEMICAL-RED SUNSETS. A yeasty gritty taste to the air—how easy to become addicted! And elsewhere, whatever comes to constitute elsewhere, will never quite satisfy. For here is Brownian motion—ceaseless, mesmerizing—a cityscape of grids interrupted by expressways snaking through neighborhoods, cutting streets and lives in two—and no looking back.

  For it is a city to be traversed by automobile. It is a city that has sprung to life out of the automobile. Mass production! Overpasses, ramps, railroad tracks, razed buildings and vacant lots where weeds grow to the size of small trees, billboards, houses—blocks, acres, square miles of houses—stretching out forever. Shut my eyes and suddenly I am trembling with excitement, gripping the wheel of an automobile. Again driving south along Livernois in the rain, hoping to enter the John Lodge Expressway just above Fenkell. Or I am driving on Six Mile Road east to Woodward. Or making the turn off Eight Mile Road and Litchfield, grateful to be home. (But which home? It must be the first house my husband and I owned when we were new to Detroit, young instructors at Wayne State University and the University of Detroit respectively—a “Colonial” house of two storeys, four bedrooms, with white aluminum siding, blue shutters, and what seemed to us a large corner lot at the corner of Woodstock Drive and Litchfield. The price, in 1973?—$17,900.)

  Shut my eyes, and there is Detroit. As if it has never gone out of my life.

  WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, newly married, with new jobs and in a new city the future is open wide as an interstate highway crossing the Great Plains. All’s ahead, massive open sky, horizon barely visible and the landscape behind so flat you can’t see it.

  WE ARRIVED IN THE early summer of 1962 and we left in the early summer of 1968. A brief six years but a lifetime, in fact, a sentimental education never to be repeated for me.

  For never underestimate the power—benevolent, malevolent, profound and irresistible—of place.

  The first year, we lived on the second floor of a two-storey apartment building on Manderson Road, just south of prestigious Palmer Park with its beautiful old mansions, graceful curving drives and tall elms, and north of Six Mile/McNichols Road. A benevolent fate had brought me to teach English at the (Jesuit) University of Detroit (four courses of which two were expository writing—and I loved it) and my husband was an instructor at Wayne State University (though soon to be invited to join the faculty at the University of Windsor across the Detroit River in Canada). Our second residence, on Woodstock, was acquired perhaps a year later, or sometime in 1964 (I remember typing the final draft of Expensive People there—a novel not to be published until 1968 when I, too, was teaching at the University of Windsor). Our third and largest residence was a brick and wood Colonial on Sherbourne Road just above Seven Mile, on the corner of Berkeley and two or three blocks from Livernois. What a leafy, lovely neighborhood this was, an area known as Sherwood Forest—a less prestigious variant of Palmer Park, and very Jewish. During the 1967 “riot”—the most profound as it would be the most tragic and consequential of historical incidents in Detroit—there was looting, burning, and vandalism on then-stylish Livernois for a day and a night as we cowered in our house hoping only to be spared the wrath of fellow citizens who were strangers to us as we were strangers to them.

  THE QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN CITY. That fast-beating stubborn heart.

  May you live in interesting times is said to be an ancient Chinese curse but the fact is that for the writer/artist to live in “interesting”—(i.e., turbulent, unsettled, dangerous)—times and places is likely to be the turning point in one’s life.

  IN DETROIT, THE LANDSCAPE of western New York State that had so long sustained me, like a riddle or a mystery eluding comprehension, began to fade, to a degree; my subjects for fiction were less likely to be rural, or rather mythic-rural; my obsessional nature began to fix itself upon the extraordinary, indeed unfathomable urban reality in which I was now living, and almost by accident the routes which I was obliged to drive, and which my husband Ray was obliged to drive, took us into parts of Detroit we might otherwise not have known. (As inhabitants of the affluent “white” suburbs of Detroit—Grosse Pointe, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills predominantly—rarely drove into certain parts of the city but only—rapidly!—through them, on the John Lodge Expressway to the tip of “City Center” at the Detroit River.) Teaching night-school courses to adults in Detroit as well as more traditional students during the day was profoundly consequential: I have only to shut my eyes to see that first, to me intimidating, classroom at the University of Detroit, rows of students (of whom many were older than I was, at twenty-three) to the very back of the room (forty enrolled)—designated to be mine.

  In such a place, the writer/artist vanishes as her surroundings come to life. The writer/artist becomes quiet as the individuals who surround her speak.

  Always I will recall, following our first class, the tall middle-aged soft-spoken and very well-dressed African-American minister who shook my hand and told me Thank you Mrs. Smith for giving us hope.

  SO MUCH OF MY writing from approximately 1963 to 1976 centers upon or has been emotionally inspired by Detroit and its suburbs that it is hardly possible for me, years later, to extract the historical and autobiographical from the fictional. Life is dazzlingly fecund but art must be selective.

  Of course, I would have been a writer—I would have continued to be a writer (I’d already written my first two books before moving to Detroit)—whether I had come to live in Detroit or not. But Detroit so entered my soul, my subjects became almost immediately urban, and my settings were as “real” as the view from a moving automobile; my imagination shifted from a fascination with a quasisurreal rural landscape to a hyper-realist cityscape. My younger and less experienced self might have recoiled from the sheer bombardment of stimulation in a place like Detroit of the 1960s when the “Motor Capital of the World” was not an ironic designation, and the city fairly simmered with pent-up excitement—Motown, culture, politics, civil rights issues.

  After the “riot” of July 1967, there was a seismic shift in the soul of Detroit. You could try to ignore it—you could try, as an individual, to combat it—but you could not control its effect upon you, and you could not predict the ways in which you would be altered by it.

  Recalling how our house was burglarized and we’d entered without realizing what danger we might have been in, though guessing that something was wrong—a sliding door at the rear, unlocked and open as we had not left it; the chagrin we’d felt, more than alarm or agitation at being burglarized, when Detroit police officers reprimanded us for having stepped inside a house in which a crime might have been “in progress.”

  That’s how you get yourself killed, see? Next time stay outside.

  Recalling how, though we’d always been on cordial, neighborly terms with the African-American family who lived next to us on Sherbourne Road, our neighbors’ two young sons began to berate us, even to overturn our trash at the curb, in the months following the riot; once to our astonishment shouting at us as we approached our car in the driveway—You think we’re animals! You think we’re animals!

  How furious they were, these boys! They were perhaps ten, twelve years old. They seemed to us much too young for such fury, and such hatred—surely they were repeating words their parents had said in their hearing, about us, their neighbors the Smiths.

  We were too stunned to protest. Perhaps, in our white skins, we were too confounded by regret, and by guilt. And by fear, that something violent would happen very quickly, as such violent acts happened quickly in Detroit, altering the best-intentioned lives forever.