My face burned with shame. Poor deluded Joyce, who’d been too frequently praised for such flights of fancy at Syracuse, and even previously in high school, now caught as in a net, and revealed as profoundly foolish in the eyes of fellow graduate students as in Professor Hughes’s disdainful vision—a barbarian who stood before them naked, utterly exposed.
How many times in the weeks and months to come as a first-year graduate student, trailing remnants of literary idealism, I was made to feel in the entombed confines of venerable Bascom Hall, like the humiliated boy-narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby”—a “creature driven and deluded by vanity.” I saw myself, too, as the older sister of a child born autistic (for this was the diagnosis, in 1960) and doomed never to utter a single coherent sentence through her life, nor even a coherent word, as a creature of sheer chance, the consequence of a “normal” birth, and my parents “young” parents at the time of my birth; the biochemical nature of my brain, unlike those of my unlucky sister Lynn, in a benign equilibrium. I could not claim autonomy, or free will, as I could not claim credit for having created myself, yet I was obliged to play at autonomy, to assume free will, for what alternative is there? As William James has said—My first act of freedom will be to believe in freedom. Yet to be proud of one’s intelligence, talent, looks, or achievement has always seemed to me misguided; to betray a misunderstanding of the shake of the dice that grants us, or fails to grant us, our humanity.
For some personalities, the stronger the conviction of fate, the more driven to assert “free will.” How is such a contradiction possible? Perhaps it is as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in his self-excoriating confession “The Crack-Up”: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
“HOW STRANGE THIS IS! We’re all together—here.”
Not I but another young woman spoke, in a way of childlike wonder tinged with something like irony. But a very subtle irony, for “Marianna Mason Churchland” (a close approximation of her quaintly lovely name) was a very subtle person.
Marianna was from a small town near Raleigh, North Carolina; her melodic accent was enchanting, especially to one from the flat nasal terrain of western New York. The first glimpse I had of Mari anna, I was struck by her prim schoolgirl beauty, ivory-pale skin, dark eyes and dark brows, very dark hair, and straight posture. Marianna was the quintessential “good girl”—but her lips curved in prankishness and irony. She wore crisp white blouses (which she ironed herself, lovingly, in her room in Barnard Hall with the door open so that neighbors could drop in and visit if they wished) and pencil skirts or perfectly pleated black woolen slacks; her hair was severely parted in the center of her head, and gathered in a chignon at the back; if Marianna wore makeup, it was as subtle as she, scarcely discernible. Here was a sister, as my own sister could never be; as my dear lost friend Cynthia Heike had not been, for I’d never gained access to Cynthia’s heart, and Cynthia had not finally cared to gain access to mine. But Marianna was a girl essentially so like myself, we might have been gazing at each other through a glass mistaken as a mirror; like Milton’s Eve gazing at her own reflection, enthralled, mesmerized, irresistibly moved to love. Like me Marianna was a first-year graduate student in English though her interest wasn’t American literature but rather medieval English literature, which seemed suddenly to me so much more rarefied, so much more distinctive, than the nineteenth-century American works that were my major field of study. Like me, Marianna lived in a single room on the third floor of Barnard Hall, which was the graduate women’s residence on campus, a solemn stony place to contemplate from the foot of the hill at University Avenue, but a more solemn place to enter. In a place of stone, be secret and exult—Yeats’s vehement admonition came to me frequently as I ascended this hill, though I could not think that Yeats would have meant quite this. In deference to the rigors of graduate school, so very different from the more gregarious and lax atmosphere of undergraduate life, each of the rooms in Barnard Hall was a “single”—spartan, cell-like.
As an undergraduate I had once been fortunate enough to live in a “single” room, but I had also been paired with roommates; in my last semester, with two roommates. Fortunately, these were sympathetic friends, and serious students like myself, and in any case I had done most of my studying and writing elsewhere. Often I’d returned to our room after my roommates had gone to bed and so their presence hadn’t been distracting, and I had not distracted them; I had liked these roommates very much, and I believe that they’d liked me. But Barnard Hall was not a place for girlish friendships. All that was behind me now.
Surreal and disquieting smells as of disinfectant, bandages, old books and (stale?) food pervade my memory of this graduate women’s residence in which I lived for a single exhausting semester; Marianna was the one to first identify these odors, prankishly, with a crinkle of her delicate nose to suggest how strange all this was, a kind of reverse-miracle, that we’d all come from far-flung parts of the country to this place—“Bah-nard Hill” as she called it.
The pressure of graduate school, at least as first-year English graduate students experienced it, was unrelenting: hundreds of pages of reading each week, and these pages densely printed on tissue-thin paper—Old English Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by Bede, Cynewulf, Caedmon; Liturgical Plays of the Story of Christ, The Castle of Perseverance, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Damon and Pythias, Second Shepherd’s Play, Everyman, Noah’s Flood. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, witty John Skelton, Jacobean and Elizabethan and Restoration drama and more. Much more. We discovered Sir Thomas Wyatt, and committed to heart the mysterious gem “They Flee from Me” (1557)—
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber,
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change . . .
The great works of English literature were monuments to be approached with reverence. Unlike my Syracuse professors, these older, Harvard-trained professors at Wisconsin did not regard literature as an art but rather more as historical artifact, to be discussed in terms of its context; there was little or no discussion of a poem as a composition of carefully chosen words. History, not aesthetics. The thrilling emotional punch of great art—totally beyond the range of these earnest scholarly individuals. One might lecture on Latin influences in pre-Shakespearean drama, or “influences” in Shakespeare, but the white-hot dynamic of Macbeth, for instance, the brilliant and dazzling interplay of “personalities” that is Shakespearean essential drama was unknown to them. If they were explorers, they’d been becalmed in an inlet, while the great river rushed past a few miles away.
Yet, at Madison, I did read, reread, and immerse myself in the work of Herman Melville. For a course at Syracuse I’d read the early, relatively straightforward White Jacket, and the wonderfully enigmatic short stories—“Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “The Encantadas.” While still in high school I’d read Moby-Dick—our greatest American novel, which one might read and reread through a lifetime, as one might read and reread the poetry of Emily Dickinson. At Madison, I became entranced by the very intransigence, one might say the obstinate opacity of the near-unreadable Pierre; or, the Ambiguities—a pseudo-romance written in mockery of its (potential, female) readers, as if by a (male) author who’d come to hate the effort of narrative prose fiction itself. (It isn’t surprising that Pierre sold poorly, as its great predecessor Moby Dick sold poorly. Tragic Melville—“Dollars damn me!”) After a few pages of its curiously stilted, self-regarding prose I fell under the spell of the slightly more accessible allegory The Conf
idence-Man, as well as Billy Budd. I wondered what to make of Benito Cereno with its perversely glacial-slow pace: in our racially sensitized era we expect that Melville will surely side with the slave uprising, and not with white oppressors like Captain Cereno, but Melville doesn’t comply with our twenty-first-century expectations in this case in which “the shadow of the Negro” falls over everyone—including even the executed rebel Babo.
Writers who are enrolled in graduate programs soon feel the frustration, the ignominy, the pain of being immersed in reading the work of others—illustrious, renowned others—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton—Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James—when they are themselves unable to write or even to fantasize writing. During these months of intense academic study when my head was crammed with great and not-so-great classic works, of course I had no time for fiction or poetry of my own (as I thought it) except desperate fragments in a journal like cries for help.
Suffocated by books. Crushed by books. Library stacks, tall shelves of books, books, books overturning upon the young writer groping in the dark for the overhead light to switch on . . .
IT WAS THRILLING TO undertake such bouts of reading, as in a plunge into unfathomable depths of the ocean; it was thrilling and also terrifying, for at such depths one could not easily breathe, and the more desperate one was to concentrate one’s thoughts, the more likely one’s thoughts were to break and scatter like panicked birds from a tree. It was not fair to think of Barnard Hall in hospital terms. Its occupants, graduate women, were very different from the undergraduate girls with whom I’d lived for four years at Syracuse; they were not, obviously, patients or convalescents; most of them appeared to be older than I was, and exuded an air of determined bustle, grimly cheery energy like that of nuns in a convent who must brave the world outside the convent which is run by men, the other. (In fact there were two nuns on my floor, each from a different Catholic order, living in separate rooms. They were to be observed sitting together in the residence cafeteria quietly speaking together.) My convent-cell with its single window overlooking University Avenue was on the third floor of the residence and in that room already in the first weeks of my adventure at Madison I was stricken by intermittent insomnia as by a swarm of invisible mosquitoes lying in wait in the dark no matter how exhausted I was from hours of reading, note taking, research at the graduate library, an increased restlessness (walking, running) that has long characterized my life, no matter how I tried to calm my rampaging thoughts.
Insomnia! There is a sickly romance to the affliction—initially. To be awake while others are asleep, especially if you leave your room and wander the corridors, is to feel that you are moving through others’ dreams. To be awake for long hours is to seem to possess more of the day, and of consciousness, than those others who merely sleep. But the romance is short-lived and soon you find yourself panting in fear lying in, or on, your narrow bed willing sleep, sleep like a hypnotist with fading powers. My particular insomnia-affliction in Madison was to see pass before my tight-shut eyelids careening shapes, bizarre forms, hallucinatory objects (dog-snouts, human limbs encumbered by braces, splintered vegetation like storm debris) and most persistently the faces of strangers vividly delineated as in photographic close-ups, their eyes locking with mine. I would wonder if I was losing my mind—if “my” mind was a singular entity, that I might “lose”—or rather, if my brain was suffering a kind of seismic stroke, or strokes, that would leave me whimpering and wordless like my poor sister. Or were such visions what had driven my friend Cynthia to suicide, swallowing a horrific chemical with the property of Drano—of which I did not allow myself to think.
Was I supposed to recognize the individuals in my hypnagogic dreams? Why did they stare at me so intently as if demanding Don’t you know who we are? The secret that connects us?
I did not share my unhappiness with my neighbors in Barnard Hall, not even Marianna who seemed so like myself, at least as I presented myself to the world. (I did not want to jeopardize even these tentative friendships. I did not think that I could afford to be so utterly alone in this strange new place.) Madison, Wisconsin, was in those days a seemingly idyllic university town built on the south bank of Lake Mendota. The enormous sprawling campus inhabited woodland near the lake; the terrain was nearly as hilly as Syracuse, a landscape convulsed by glaciers in the Ice Age, and retaining still, even on sunny autumn days, a wintry Ice Age flavor. Warmth feels temporary, freezing-cold is permanent beneath. In Madison as in all new and unfamiliar places before habitude dulls or masks strangeness I realized how precarious is our hold on what we call sanity.
I was missing a part of my soul, it seemed. I was homesick—for Millersport, for my family, and for the part of my life I had never quite examined, that urged me to write.
I felt breathless, edgy. I could not sleep, for my brain could not shut down. Oxygen seemed to be draining out of any room in which I found myself. It was not good to be alone, and yet, with others, I yearned to be alone. I yearned to cry, and rid myself of unhappiness. But unhappiness is not so easily thrown off.
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 wa
s; 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.
The Lost Landscape Page 21