The Lost Landscape Page 22

Raymond Joseph Smith and I would become engaged on November 23, 1960; we would be married on January 23, 1961. (Ray’s parents came from Milwaukee for the small wedding, for it was a short drive to Madison. My parents did not attend, perhaps because they didn’t feel that they could afford plane travel, and certainly they could not have left my sister Lynn behind, or in anyone’s care.)

  I had not thought that I would ever be married. Vaguely I retained an ideal, or an image, of being a “teacher”—based upon Mrs. Dietz, of my old one-room school. And though Mrs. Dietz was obviously a married woman, she did not exude any wifely air, or even any clearly defined sexual air. She had always seemed, amid the schoolchildren, of whom a number were hardly “children” but precociously mature young adults, essentially alone, stalwart in her authority.

  And yet, I had become married. I was deeply in love, and a little frightened of my new state, in which suddenly one “cares for” another as one “cares for” oneself—yet the other is not always predictable. (Is he?)

  Soon you realize that your fears for yourself are now doubled—you will fear for the other, too. His happiness, his well-being. His career.

  Nonetheless, it was certainly the case that I could be defined as happy.

  In some quarters, observed by my Barnard Hall neighbors and friends, very happy.

  And yet, inwardly, simultaneously, contrary to Aristotle’s logic that one cannot be X and non-X at the same time, in the interstices of happiness, very unhappy.

  Or rather, distracted, distressed. Uncertain. Overwhelmed.

  In the decades following 1960 to 1961 the confessional mode has become a predominant literary genre. As a writer I have not been drawn to what is called memoirist prose because I have never felt that my life could be nearly as interesting as what my imagination could make of another’s life; whatever my “story” is, it is not compelling set beside others’ stories, including those of my parents and my grandparents and others of their generations who have lived, it had always seemed to me, a life closer to the bone than their children and grandchildren. (In my single novel that suggests memoirist fiction, I’ll Take You There, only the setting, Syracuse University, is “real.” The young woman undergraduate protagonist, unnamed, does not share the author’s biography and is not the author but a means of writing about an intensely observed experience of a certain time and place. Yet she is obviously closer to me than any twin sister!) And I know that the “confessed” is a text; a text is language artfully arranged; language artfully arranged is not authentic; the not-authentic is not the aim of the serious confession. The vogue of seemingly sensational confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s was a dramatic reaction against the airless, stiffly impersonal, acrostics-poetry being written at that time, under the influence of (Anglican) T. S. Eliot who decreed that poetry should be impersonal, a matter of elite cultural allusions and symbols, never a cri de coeur. No Shelley, no Whitman, no D. H. Lawrence! Indeed, no Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats! With the eruption of the Beats into American culture at mid-century the old way of poetry was overcome as by rabble cheerfully beating down palace gates, and poetry would never be the same again. Fortunately! But the new, seemingly raw mode of self-expression imposes its own conventions on practitioners who may feel compelled to be radical, sensational, merciless, and unsparing in their exploitation of themselves and others. (Think of the preeminent Establishment poet of his time, Robert Lowell, appropriating the intimate, candid, pleading letters of his former wife Elizabeth Hardwick for his poetry: “Why not say what happened?” is Lowell’s apologia.) When our experience doesn’t match the high stakes of self-expression, ever ratcheted upward, experience has to be falsified; the remainder of life, the unsensational, the quotidian, the quiet, the sentimental and tender and obvious, has to be denied. For these reasons, as well as for reasons of personal/familial reticence, until A Widow’s Story (2011), I did not write about my private life; my intensely personal life; I did not write “thinly disguised fiction” or outright memoir about my husband Raymond Smith, my marriage, the initial experience of falling in love; never have I attempted to record the minutiae, the daily-ness, of an intimate companionate life. It is enough to state that I met by chance, at a Sunday afternoon reception for graduate students in the student union at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the individual who would so alter my life as to seem to revise my very history so that there is the life leading up to and the life subsequent.

  Of our hurts and bafflements we create monuments to survival; of our good choices, and our good luck, we are obliged to remain silent. We dare not speak for another, and it is always wrong to expose intimacy even in the celebration of intimacy.

  AND THEN, AMID A time of happiness, my body began to break down.

  A sudden attack of tachycardia in my room late one night when I was reading and annotating John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)—a Renaissance text of such Herculean dullness it must be read to be believed but who would wish to read it, except under duress? Suddenly, a kind of clamp shut over my heart, and opened again, propelling my heartbeat into a rapid hammering that made my chest vibrate visibly, and sucked away my breath. What had happened? Why? So swiftly, without warning? It was as if a switch had been pulled, and suddenly—I was helpless.

  Tachycardia pulls blood from finger- and toe-tips so that you begin to feel the chill (of impending death?)—like Socrates observing the chill of death rising in his legs, in Plato’s Phaedo. I was twenty-two—I was alone in my room in Barnard Hall—my first thought was that I did not want my fiancé to know about this attack—really, I did not want anyone to know. Though having difficulty breathing and in terror that I would die I was not able to lie down on my bed—the hammering heartbeat is unbearable in such a position—and even sitting still at my desk became unbearable; so in a kind of trance, shivering, trembling, very cold and yet beginning to sweat, I made my way slowly—very slowly—out into the corridor.

  There was no one to witness. Some doors down was Marianna’s room, and a light shone beneath her door; but I did not want to alarm Marianna who had health issues of her own, and I did not want to reveal my weakness to Marianna who thought of me as a “beacon of sanity” (Marianna’s lightly ironic words). Other doors, shut, with no light shining beneath, held no appeal for me—I could not bring myself to knock, to beg for help.

  (Isolated incidents of health crises occurred in Barnard Hall not infrequently. There was a young woman mathematician who’d fainted after returning from a meal, falling heavily just in front of her room; several of us had tried to help her but she’d begun sobbing hysterically, and had repelled our offers of comfort. Another young woman, a mutual friend of Marianna’s and mine, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, very thin, dangerously thin, who wore white short-sleeved blouses even in cold weather of a gauzy near-transparent material that allowed the pained observer to see how skeletal she’d become, had fainting spells, and spells of weeping; vividly I recall this young woman’s pale freckled face, pale red very short hair, damp eyes as she spoke of her work as a lab assistant for an experimental cognitive psychologist who was also her advisor.)

  In the corridor for some reason I made my way with painstaking slowness, a small step at a time, and leaning against the wall, and so to the stairs; and down two flights of stairs to check, bizarrely, my mailbox into which some flyers had been shoved. (I might have called my fiancé from the phone room off the foyer but I was determined not to worry him, as I was determined not to allow him to know that I was so stricken.) At the front door of the residence I stood and breathed in the freezing-cold air; I observed a few vehicles on University Avenue, and wondered wanly who was inside, who those strangers were, whose hearts did not threaten to explode inside their chests; I thought of my younger, lost self who’d slipped from her room in the old farmhouse on Transit Road, standing in a trance of oblivion at the side of the road, like a creature who has been drawn to a vision for which there is no name, no comprehension. I did not want to think that,
in my secrecy, in my wish not to alarm or inconvenience others, I had (inadvertently, unhappily) caused a shock in my parents’ lives: for I had telephoned home one night, calling collect, after 11:00 P.M., as instructed, to tell my parents that I was engaged to be married; I had not told them that I was seeing anyone, still less that I had fallen in love; for our family reticence would have forbidden the divulgence of such information, until it was absolutely necessary.

  I even had an engagement ring of my own now. A very small diamond in a white-gold setting. My parents had been too surprised by my news to have thought to ask if I had an engagement ring, nor had I thought to tell them. But I wore the ring proudly, as if it were proof of—what? Normality?

  How long I remained at the front door of the residence, I don’t remember. I had hoped that fresh air would somehow revive me but it seemed to have had no effect at all except to make me colder, and tremble more violently.

  After a while, I decided to return to my room, and not to knock on the door of the residence advisor whose quarters were close by. Sensibly I worried that the woman would immediately summon an ambulance to take me to the ER at the university hospital; such a plunge into the unknown terrified me as a prospect, and, practical like all of my family, I worried that I would be billed for such treatment, and I could not afford it.

  Returning upstairs to my room was more arduous than descending, for I had virtually no breath; the slightest movement made me gasp for air; there was no elevator in the residence, or at least none that I can recall. Walking with severe tachycardia you feel as if you are walking on the thinnest of ice; at any moment it will break, and you will plunge through. (Did no one notice me? It was after midnight, and so the corridors must have been deserted. It is strange that I so dreaded being found out, and made to explain why my chest was visibly vibrating and my face was deathly pale; why I could have barely drawn breath to speak.) What would have required five minutes ordinarily required forty minutes now.

  At Syracuse I’d had a similar but much less severe attack of tachycardia while playing basketball, in the fall of my freshman year; I’d been knocked down, violently, by a large, aggressive girl who’d sent me sprawling onto the hardwood floor and immediately my heartbeat had gone wild, and had not ceased its hammering for a half hour or more. (This was the first time I’d had such an attack, and it had greatly frightened me.) The gym instructor herself had nearly fainted with shock, at my condition; she’d helped me walk off the court, to a place where I could lie down; eventually, she’d taken me to the university infirmary where I was made to lie down also, and spent the remainder of the attack reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude in my Great British Writers anthology.

  It seems curious to me now, that no one called an ambulance. In our present hyper-anxious time, no university would wish to make itself vulnerable to a wrongful death lawsuit.

  The medical term for my condition at the time was paroxysmal atrial tachycardia. It is believed to be triggered by stress and caffeine though in my case it seemed purely idiopathic, arising out of nowhere, provoked by nothing, a state of accelerated heartbeat that is associated with persons who have “heart murmurs.” (I must have had a “heart murmur” since birth, undetected by any Lockport doctor.) Tachycardia can be eased by a powerful intravenous medication, and the most severe attacks require emergency medical treatment, but attacks frequently cease as abruptly and mysteriously as they begin, within an hour or, if you are very lucky, within a few minutes.

  This attack, which was only the third or fourth such attack in my life, kept me incapacitated for more than an hour. And when it suddenly ceased, and I could breathe again, I nearly wept with relief and happiness; my mouth was so dry that it hurt, and my feet and hands were icy-cold, but I was happy suddenly, for I’d been spared; my way of celebrating was to continue with Euphues as if nothing had happened.

  Telling myself—See? You did the right thing. No one knows!

  (EVENTUALLY, MY FIANCÉ WOULD learn of my medical condition. That is, I would tell him. For I could not not tell him, if we were to be married.)

  (We are all in dread that we will be loved less if we are revealed to be flawed—surely sometimes that dread is not misplaced.)

  INSOMNIA ALLOWS YOU TO see clearly—like seeing things when you aren’t present, or after you have died.

  In this way, in my journal I tried to comfort myself.

  More frequent than tachycardia, insomniac nights. Since the age of thirteen I’d had difficulty sleeping; my brain raced with a kind of exhilaration that was purely mental, and seemed impersonal. (Most of my dreams seem “impersonal”—that is, the dreamer is not me, nor anyone I know; it’s as if I find myself in another’s mind, or imagination, and not my own. Settings are rarely familiar, other figures are rarely anyone I know.) In Madison, in steam-heated Barnard Hall, my insomnia worsened, unsurprisingly.

  There was too much to think about, that was the simple explanation. As if odd-sized objects were being crammed into an ordinary-sized head, distending the skull. What might have been—what should have been—the pleasurable excitement of reading major works of English and American literature under the guidance of distinguished professors was spoiled by so much that was certainly not “major” and by what seemed an insane excess of historical back ground with emphasis upon “sources.” A play, for instance, was not likely to be considered as a distinctive work of literary art, but rather as a sort of hodgepodge of influences dating back to Roman theater; a Shakespearean tragedy was an occasion for lengthy footnotes and a barrage of “sources.” That literature might be disturbing, mysterious, provocative, joyous, psychologically astute or in some way relevant to the reader was not an issue—as if no one had thought of it.

  The major literary work was a sort of beached whale lying moribund or indeed dead on the sand, providing sustenance for myriad scavengers (“scholars”); it seemed to have no significance otherwise, certainly no relationship to anything approaching “entertainment.”

  (Though probably I am being unfair, and my professors at Madison did truly love their fields of study. As young people they’d surely read these major works of English literature with enjoyment and interest; with the passage of time, their relationship to them had become professional, with all that “professional” means.)

  Insomniacs divide (unequally) into two types: night-insomniacs and morning-insomniacs. Night-insomnia can be defined as simply an extension of day-consciousness: the insomniac can’t switch off her brain but remains awake until, if she is lucky, she falls asleep sometime in the night—usually by 4:00 A.M., in my case. If you are young and in reasonably good health you might not feel the effect the next morning as adrenaline kicks in and you are borne along as by a swift-running stream. Morning! Sunshine! A new day! The morning-insomniac, however, is one who falls asleep normally, perhaps out of exhaustion, but wakes suddenly and irrevocably soon after falling asleep—within two or three hours, miserably. At once, thoughts come stampeding through the brain like maddened horses . . .

  There is the terror of lying awake until dawn, in either case. The terror of dawn itself.

  I wondered if the rushing thoughts, the hypnagogic images of strangers’ faces, were related to the fact that for the first time in my life I was not able to write—only just critical and scholarly papers, which don’t seem to require the same sort of imagination. Another world to live in is what we mean by religion—so George Santayana remarked; but another world might also mean the particular solace of art, for the artist; another world is the place to which the writer takes herself, a thrilling journey into the unknown.

  (When I have completed a novel, which requires enormous concentration and a focusing upon this other world, in the aftermath of completion I am flooded with new ideas, or rather these rushing, oneiric visions that exert a powerful spell, and make sleep all but impossible.)

  In Madison, I wondered if I was losing my mind—whatever that means, to “lose” a mind.

  Or was my distress just sleep de
privation, I didn’t know.

  Usually I gave up trying to sleep when stricken with morning-insomnia. Two or three hours of sleep is not so bad, for any dreams are better than no dreams.

  Early-morning hours when the sky is still dark. From a window, streetlights on University Avenue. Few vehicles, and the red taillights receding—a vision that continues to haunt me, still.

  And so I would walk in Barnard Hall, by night. Prowling the semi-darkened corridors as if (if someone were to see me) I was simply on my way to a communal bathroom.

  Sometimes, silently, I ran. I loved to run, I have always loved to run, for only when I’m running does my body’s metabolism feel normal. What is painful to me, deeply boring, is walking slowly—sauntering is the least attractive word in the English language.

  My hope was to make myself physically exhausted so that I could return to my room and sleep, if only for an hour or two. The sweetness of oblivion! Insomniacs overvalue what eludes them, elevating sleep to a near-mystical experience. As a lanky, skittish teenager I’d been subtly reprimanded by our family doctor who’d called me “high-strung” when he’d tried with some difficulty to examine me; the implication being that someday when I was more mature I would become “normal.” And so I had not told my future husband how often I suffered from insomnia, preferring to think that, once I was married, my insomnia might fade.

  And so too, I did not want to present myself in any way as “weak”—even to one who loved me. As a young woman in an overwhelmingly masculine, patriarchal, and hierarchical world, studying in a field in which there were virtually no women professors, I understood that to require sympathy, protectiveness, pity might be a solace in the short run but in the long run, it would be a mistake for if I were to succeed in my profession, I would have to be perceived as an honorary male. There was no place in the academic world for the female.

  (This was an instinct shared by other women graduate students of my acquaintance. We were not living in convents exactly, but the qualities of personality cultivated by the convent were desirable—docility, obedience, self-effacement, acquiescence to authority. For years I would publish critical/scholarly articles in academic journals under the gender-neutral names “J. C. Oates” and, my married name, “J. Oates-Smith.”)