The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

  How we live what seems random, which we experience as fate.

  A writer’s work is a codified transcript of the writer’s life. The (public) work is a record of the (private) life. As years pass, however, and the private/secret life is forgotten except in outline, even the key to the code is but haphazardly recalled, for past secrets are never so tantalizingly secret as those of the present. But the work remains, books remain, as testimonies of a kind.

  To the modest extent to which any book, any work of the imagination, can define itself as a unique entity in the world.

  IN 1968, WE LEFT Detroit to live in Windsor, Ontario, in a small white-brick house overlooking the Detroit River, across from Belle Isle; it is a geographical, or perhaps a political oddity, that Windsor, Ontario, Canada, is in fact south of Detroit, Michigan, USA.

  In 1978, we left Windsor to live in Princeton, New Jersey, where I would teach at the university for several decades—though, in the vividness and starkness of memory, it seems very recent that we’d moved to Windsor; that air of bittersweet yearning, so associated, to me, with driving the endless streets and expressways of Detroit, often in miserable weather, prevails through decades.

  The last time I returned to Detroit it was in fact to Grosse Pointe, where I gave a reading at the War Memorial in the fall of 2005, and was driven into the profoundly altered, depopulated and diminished city that had once been so vibrant, and so hopeful; this was an emotionally evocative sentimental journey, that took me to certain of the settings, the very addresses, memorialized in my novels them, Expensive People, Do with Me What You Will and any number of short stories and poems. For here too is a lost urban landscape, irrevocably lost to history, as that part of my life is irrevocably lost. Turning onto Eight Mile Road from Livernois. A mile or so east, then turning onto Litchfield from Eight Mile. And before Woodstock Drive turning into the driveway of our corner house, driving my little black Volkswagen into our garage beside my husband’s car, also a Volkswagen; opening the door that leads into the kitchen, and calling to my husband somewhere inside—“Hello?I’m home.”

  STORY INTO FILM: “WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” AND SMOOTH TALK

  SOME YEARS AGO IN the American Southwest there surfaced a tabloid psychopath known as “the Pied Piper of Tucson” whose specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teenaged girls. This individual may or may not have had actual accomplices, but his murders were known among a circle of teenagers in the Tucson area who, for some reason, maintained their loyalty to him, and did not inform parents or police. It was this fact, the fact of the teenagers’ loyalty to the psychopath, that struck me at the time as highly disturbing and yet perhaps not so very surprising. For had I not been a teenaged girl myself, not so very many years before?

  This was a pre-Manson time, early or mid-1960s. It is worthy of note that the term “serial killer” did not yet exist.

  The “Pied Piper” mimicked teenagers in talk, dress, and behavior, but he was not a teenager—he was a man in his early thirties. Rather short, he stuffed rags and crumpled newspapers in his leather boots to give himself height. (And sometimes walked unsteadily: did no one among his adolescent admirers notice?) He charmed his victims as charismatic psychopaths have always charmed their victims, to the bewilderment of others, elders, who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions. The Pied Piper of Tucson: a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon—surrounded, however improbably, and finally tragically, by real people. You think that, if you look twice, he won’t be there. But there he is.

  I had noticed the article—“The Pied Piper of Tucson”—in a copy of Life in our faculty lounge at the University of Detroit, where I was a young instructor. I recall skimming the article, staring at the photographs, and then quickly closing the magazine and laying it down. I did not want to be distracted by too much detail. I was in dread of knowing too much, and my imagination blocked. (It would be decades before I even learned the name of the serial killer: Charles Schmid, Jr.; it would be forty years before I read about him in a detailed online biographical entry, while preparing this memoir.) It was not after all the mass murderer himself who intrigued me, but the disturbing fact that a number of teenagers—from “good” families—aided and abetted his crimes. (In fact, two of the murdered girls were from a prominent Tucson family.) This is the sort of horror authorities, responsible adults, and the media call “inexplicable” because they can’t find explanations for it. They would not have fallen under the maniac’s spell, after all.

  IN OUR SHERBOURNE ROAD house in Detroit, just north of Seven Mile Road, my study was a sparely furnished rosy-pink-walled room overlooking a tree-lined residential street in a neighborhood called, without irony, Sherwood Forest. In this room I would write my novel them, subsequent to the July 1967 “riot” that would have the effect of forever altering Detroit’s history, and consequently my own, as a writer; in this room, quite clearly the former bedroom of a young girl, and radiating still something of the innocence and emotional volatility of a young girl, I would write the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” which I mailed off to Epoch, a small but distinguished literary magazine published at Cornell University, where it was published in fall 1966. (Epoch’s editor James McConkey had been warmly friendly to me, having accepted for publication one of my first short stories, written when I was still an undergraduate at Syracuse University.) An early draft of the story was titled “Death and the Maiden”—which came to seem to me too explicit. The story was cast in a mode of fiction to which I am still partial—indeed, every third or fourth story of mine is probably in this mode—“realistic allegory,” it might be called. It is in the mode, so to speak, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romances, or parables; but its surface is meant to be totally realistic.

  Like the medieval German engraving from which the original title was taken, the story was minutely detailed yet clearly an allegory of the fatal attractions of death (or the devil). An innocent young girl is seduced by way of her own vanity; she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort.

  In subsequent drafts the story changed its tone, its focus, its language, its title. It became “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Written at a time when the author was intrigued by the music of Bob Dylan, particularly the hauntingly elegiac song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” it was (eventually: not at the time of the writing) dedicated to Bob Dylan. The charismatic mass murderer drops into the background and his innocent victim, a fifteen-year-old, moves into the foreground. Connie becomes the true protagonist of the tale, courting and being courted by her fate, a self-styled 1950s pop figure, a grotesque descendant, in cultural terms, of Marlon Brando’s biker-hero of The Wild One (1953). “Arnold Friend” is alternately absurd and winning—charismatic and frightening. (It was not my intention, I have to confess, that, as numerous sharp-eyed observers have noted, “Arnold Friend” can be deconstructed as “An Old Fiend.”)

  There is no suggestion in the story that “Arnold Friend” has seduced and murdered other young girls, or even that he unmistakably intends to murder Connie. Is his interest “merely” sexual? (Nor is there anything about the complicity of other teenagers. I saved that yet more provocative note for a current story, “Testimony.”) Connie is shallow, vain, silly, hopeful, doomed—but capable nonetheless of an unexpected gesture of heroism at the story’s end. Her smooth-talking seducer, who cannot lie, promises her that her family will be unharmed if she gives herself to him; and so she does. The story ends abruptly at the point of her “crossing over.” We don’t know the nature of her sacrifice, only that she is generous enough to make it.

  IN ADAPTING A NARRATIVE so spare and thematically foreshortened as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” into the beautifully composed, emotionally engaging feature film Smooth Talk, director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole were required to do a good deal of imagining, inventing, expanding. Film is a visual medium, not
a verbal medium: the camera is the narrator, not a prose voice-over. Connie’s story becomes lavishly, and lovingly, textured from the perspective of a director who knows teenaged girls intimately; Connie is not an allegorical figure but rather a “typical” teenaged girl (if Laura Dern, highly attractive without being distractingly beautiful, can be so defined). Joyce Chopra, who had done documentary films on contemporary teenage culture and, yet more authoritatively, had an adolescent daughter of her own at the time of the film, creates in Smooth Talk a vivid and absolutely believable world for Connie to inhabit. Or worlds: as in the original story there is Connie-at-home, and there is Connie-with-her-friends. Two fifteen-year-old girls, two finely honed styles, two voices, sometimes (but not often) overlapping. It is one of the marvelous visual features of the film that we see Connie and her friends transform themselves, once they are safely free of parental observation. The girls claim their true identities as young, sexual beings with no idea of what “sex” actually is, as they walk together in the neighborhood shopping mall. What freedom, what joy! And what a risk.

  WHERE THE STORY IS purely Connie’s, narrated from her limited perspective, the film is as much Connie’s mother’s story as it is Connie’s. Its center of gravity, its emotional nexus, is frequently with the mother—warmly and convincingly played by Mary Kay Place. (In the story, the mother is not so very nice. The film does not wish to explore the mother’s sexual jealousy and resentment of her attractive daughter.) Connie’s ambiguous relationship with her affable, somewhat mysterious father (Levon Helm) is an excellent touch: I had thought, subsequent to the story’s publication, that I should have focused somewhat more on Connie’s father, suggesting, as subtly as I could, an attraction there paralleling the attraction Connie feels for her seducer Arnold Friend. And Arnold Friend himself—“A. Friend” as he says—is played with appropriately overdone sexual swagger by Treat Williams, who is perfect for the part, and just the right age. We see that Arnold Friend isn’t a teenager even as Connie, mesmerized by his superficial charm, does not seem to “see” him at all—she sees only his projected image. What is so difficult to accomplish in prose—directing the reader to look over the protagonist’s shoulder, so to speak—is accomplished with enviable ease in film.

  Treat Williams as Arnold Friend is supreme in his very awfulness, as, surely, the original Pied Piper of Tucson must have been. (Though no one involved in the film knew about the original source, evidently; they had not heard of Charles Schmid, Jr.) Williams brilliantly impersonates Arnold Friend as Arnold Friend awkwardly impersonates Marlon Brando—or is it James Dean? Brando, Dean, impersonating themselves in mirrors? That poor Connie’s fate is so trashy is in fact her fate.

  WHAT IS OUTSTANDING IN Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk is its visual freshness, its sense of motion and life; the attentive intelligence the director has brought to the semi-secret world of the American adolescent—shopping mall flirtations, drive-in restaurant romances, highway hitchhiking, the fascination of rock music played very, very loud. (James Taylor’s music for the film is wonderfully appropriate. We hear it as Connie hears it; it is the seductive music of her spiritual being.) Laura Dern is so dazzlingly right as “my” Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.

  MY DIFFICULTIES WITH THIS much-acclaimed adaptation of my short story have primarily to do with my hesitation at seeing/hearing work of mine abstracted from its contexture of language. All writers know that Language is our subject; quirky word choices, patterns of rhythm, enigmatic pauses, punctuation marks. Where the quick scanner sees “quick” writing, the writer conceals ninetenths of the iceberg. Of course we all have subjects, and we feel great passion and commitment to these, but beneath the tale it is the tale-telling that grips us so very fiercely. The writer works in a single dimension, the director works in three. It is always my assumption that the film people who have adapted my work are professionals; authorities in their medium as I am an authority (if I am) in mine. I would fiercely defend the placement of a semicolon in one of my novels but I would probably have deferred in the end to Joyce Chopra’s decision to reverse the story’s conclusion, turn it upside down, in a sense, so that the film ends not with the death of vanity, not with a sleepwalker-maiden crossing over to Death, but with a scene of reconciliation, rejuvenation. Connie and her older sister reclaim music for themselves—celebrate themselves. Is this realistic? Is this probable? It is a satisfying ending.

  A GIRL’S LOSS OF virginity, bittersweet but not necessarily tragic. Not today. A girl’s coming-of-age that involves her succumbing to, but then rejecting, the “trashy dreams” of her pop teenage culture. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” defines itself as allegorical in its conclusion: Death and Death’s chariot (a funky souped-up convertible) have come for the Maiden. Awakening is, in the story’s final lines, moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waits:

  My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with [Connie’s] brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.

  —a vision perhaps impossible to transfigure into film.

  PHOTO SHOOT: WEST ELEVENTH STREET, NYC, MARCH 6, 1970

  Joyce Carol Oates, New York City, March 6, 1970. (Jack Robinson for Vogue)

  “ALMOST PATHETICALLY SERIOUS”—so Vogue wrote of the thirty-two-year-old novelist whose photograph appeared in the August 15, 1970, issue of the magazine. The writer went on to note that the novelist, whose fourth novel, them, had received the National Book Award for 1970, was “tentative, hush-voiced, with the fixed brown eyes of a sleepwalker” and that “daydreaming” had given to her writing a “peculiar floating quality” somewhat at odds with the violence of her subject. An excerpt from the novelist’s National Book Award acceptance speech was quoted: “What an artist has to resist and turn to his advantage is violence.” The photo-replica of the novelist’s face of 1970, strangely without expression, masklike and dreamy and “serene,” ironically gave no indication of the maelstrom of emotions she was feeling at the time of the photo-shoot: excitement, wonderment, stress, a kind of chronic ontological anxiety.

  Photographed for Vogue! The most elegant, as it was the most daunting and mysterious, of the several glossy magazines my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, herself a somewhat mysterious woman, brought to our house in Millersport, New York, when I was growing up in the 1950s. Other magazines were the more practical-minded Redbook, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan (in an earlier, earnest and even “literary” incarnation), Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping; the career-girl Mademoiselle (where in 1959 my first published story, “In the Old World,” appeared); and the New Yorker, most prized in our household for its cartoons, and inhabited by fey, epicene individuals we assumed were New York City sophisticates. My grandmother Blanche was an accomplished seamstress, sewing for me, and sometimes for my mother, not only skirts, blouses, jumpers but also suits and coats; my grandmother chose her designs from Butterick, Simplicity, McCall’s, but also—at times—Vogue, which were the most difficult (and chic) patterns; it was for the sake of the fashion features in Vogue that my grandmother bought the expensive magazine, thick as a phone book with astonishing photographs. Of all the magazines that came into the house it was Vogue that evoked the most fascination to a girl living on a small not-very-prosperous farm in upstate New York, as it was Vogue that aroused in my father the most sardonic of remarks relating to women’s fashions. (Many of Daddy’s remarks, expressing bemused indignation, began with a scowl and a muttered “Jaysus—!”) Both Daddy and I would have been stunned speechless if we could have known that, one day, the name Oates would appear in Vogue, as both byline and subject.

  For here was a trove of the mystical, magically empowered feminine, distinct from the (me
rely) utilitarian female (on a farm, females have their specific uses, none of which is romantic in the slightest): Vogue was, among other things, a shrine honoring sheer nonutilitarian beauty, most of which happened to be, not female, but feminine. It would be decades before I encountered Sigmund Freud’s remark in his late, melancholy Civilization and Its Discontents: “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”

  Already in early adolescence I had become an astute observer of worlds so foreign to my own, I might have been contemplating the photographs of women and men from another species, captured, for Vogue, by the lenses of such legendary photographers as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. No more than I might have fantasized looking like any of these socialites and models wearing extraordinary clothes, jewels, and footwear could I have imagined seeing myself one day in Vogue.

  On March 4, 1970, I had received the National Book Award for my novel them at a gala celebration in New York City; this portrait was taken in the late morning of March 6, in a studio in a town house on West Eleventh Street. Amid a flurry of interviews and photography sessions during my brief, vertiginous visit to New York City for the National Book Award event, this image is the only one that is dramatically imprinted in my memory. What is evoked in the portrait for me is a perverse sort of nostalgia: the recollection of that era of peril, beginning with the tragic and dispiriting assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and continuing through a dazed, near-anarchic decade of assassinations and “race riots” in American cities (as infamously in Detroit in July 1967 when my husband Ray Smith and I were living in that beleaguered city) through the end of the bloody, protracted, and exhausting Vietnam War in 1973. It is an era difficult to evoke to those who didn’t live through it: when paranoia flourished, and with justification; drug use became as commonplace as cigarettes; and isolated acts of terrorism, bombs on college campuses, for instance, or detonated at the Pentagon, were purely “American-revolutionary-radical” and not foreign. For on the morning of the photo shoot on West Eleventh Street, after a night of fitful sleep in a spacious, elegantly shabby Central Park West apartment listening to the nighttime noises of the great city (if sirens were neon-red traceries in the sky, how like a cat’s cradle the sky above New York City would look!), as I sat stiff and self-conscious trying not to blink in the glaring lights, trying, as the photographer gently urged me, to “relax—smile,” there came suddenly, from somewhere alarmingly close by, a deafening explosion. Windows in the photographer’s studio rattled; the floors, walls, ceiling of the studio shook; for a terrible moment, it seemed that the very brownstone would shatter and collapse around us.