In Rough Country Read online

  With one so strong-minded as Donald Barthelme, you could not easily change the subject. You would remain on Don’s subject for as long as Don wished to examine that subject, he with the air of a bemused vivisectionist. As Don’s prose fiction is whimsical-shading-into-nightmare, cartoon-surreal-visionary, so Don’s personality on such quasi-social occasions was likely to be that of the playful bully, perversely defining himself as an outsider, a marginal figure, a “loser” in the marketplace, in contrast to others whose books sold more, or so he believed. No sooner had my husband and I been welcomed into the Barthelmes’ brownstone apartment—no sooner had I congratulated Don on what I’d believed to be the very positive reviews and best-seller status of his new book of stories, Amateurs—than he corrected me with a sneering smile, informing me that Amateurs wasn’t a best seller, and that no book of his had ever been a best seller; his book sales were “nothing like” mine; if I doubted this, we could make a bet—for $100—and check the facts. Quickly I backed down, I declined the bet—no doubt in my usual embarrassed and conciliatory way, hoping to change the subject.

  But Don wasn’t in the mood to change the subject just yet. To everyone’s embarrassment—Ray’s, mine, his wife’s—Don picked up a phone receiver, dialed a number, and handed the receiver to me with the request that I speak to his editor—he’d called Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Giroux—and ask if in fact Donald Barthelme had ever had a best seller; and so, trying to fall in with the joke, which seemed to me to have gone a little further than necessary, I asked Roger Straus—whom I didn’t know, had scarcely heard of at this time in my life—if Don had ever had a best seller, and was told no, he had not.

  Plaintively I asked, “He hasn’t? Not ever? I thought…”

  The individual at the other end of the line, whom I would meet years later, the legendary Roger Straus of one of the most distinguished publishing firms in New York, said coolly, “No. He has not. Put Don on the phone, please, I want to talk to him.”

  Of course, Donald Barthelme was hardly a “mentor” of mine—I had the distinct idea that he’d read very little of my writing, probably not a single book, only just short stories in collections in which we both appeared, such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards or magazines like Harper’s and The Atlantic. (It would be a long time before my fiction began to appear, not very frequently, in The New Yorker, in which Barthelme’s wildly experimental short fiction had become a fixture rivaling the well-crafted traditional short fiction of John Updike. How upset Don would be were he living now, to see how George Saunders has usurped his New Yorker space with his deftly orchestrated Barthelme-inspired American-Gothic-surreal short fiction.) In my presence, at least, as on that uncomfortably hot July day in 1977 when we had lunch in the Village, it seemed important to Donald to establish himself as both a martyr of sorts—the brilliant iconoclastic/experimental writer whose books sold less than they deserved to sell—and the most strong-willed among us. Social engagements with Donald Barthelme were conducted strictly on Barthelmian terms.

  If he were still alive—he died in 1989, of cancer—Don would be seventy-six years old at the time of this writing, December 2008. Very likely the Barthelmian edginess would have subsided by now. Very likely even Nabokov wouldn’t have been considered a rival but something like a colleague, a brother, or a friend.

  The Friend. Though I was on friendlier, more relaxed and affectionate terms with my fellow western–New Yorker John Gardner, who’d published an early short story of mine titled “The Death of Mrs. Sheer” in his literary magazine MSS—and who regarded me, somewhat embarrassingly, as a “major American writer”—like himself—it can’t be said that John Gardner was a mentor of mine, either. John was my sole writer friend who read my writing with enormous seriousness, which was both flattering, and unsettling; it sometimes seemed that John took my books almost as seriously as he took his own. His model would seem to have been the elder, didactic, somewhat tiresome Tolstoy: Art must be moral. Another model might have been the zealous reformer Martin Luther. For this reason, John took it as his duty to chide, criticize, scold—in particular he scolded me about my “pessimism”—my “tragic view of life” it was John’s hope to enlist me in the quixotic enterprise of writing what he called “moral fiction”—see the preacherly On Moral Fiction (1978). My next novel should be, for instance, a novel that John’s young daughter could read and be left with the feeling that “life was worthwhile”—so John argued, with grim persistence, pushing aside his near-untouched plate of food (thick sirloin steak leaking blood), and drinking glass after glass of Scotch.

  How I replied to this, as to other admonitions of John Gardner’s, I have no idea.

  Though John professed to admire my novels A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, them, Wonderland—though he gave my postmodernist Gothic Bellefleur a long, thoughtfully written, and generous review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and always spoke highly of me in public in venues in which he mischievously and maliciously denounced many of our cohorts—he always seemed disappointed in me. I might have been an acolyte who’d managed to elude the gravitational pull of a powerful planetary force—an American Tolstoy-visionary in the mortal form of John Gardner.

  With my longtime predilection for the playful experimentation of James Joyce, no less than for the intransigent tragic humanism of D. H. Lawrence and the absurdist surrealism of Franz Kafka, I was not likely to be influenced by my fellow western New Yorker from Batavia. I was not likely to be told what to do, still less why I must do it. Nor did I understand the passion with which John attacked his slightly older postmodernist contemporaries, of whom a number were his friends, or had been—John Barth, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin. I never understood the bitterness of some of these rivalries, which hurt John more than they hurt others and made enemies of individuals who should have been friends and supporters at a time when John badly needed support.

  But then, I don’t really understand the messianic personality—the hectoring Tolstoy, the righteous Martin Luther. I never understood why so exceptional a personality as John Gardner wanted so much to influence others. During our often noisy evenings together, when John lectured in one of his lengthy, lurching, eloquently drunken monologues or argued with someone who dared to challenge him, the calm, still, sane words of Henry David Thoreau came to me: I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. Why this compulsion to enjoin others to think as you believe they should? It seemed futile to me, foolish.

  Years of proselytizing, preaching and sniping at other writers provoked a considerable backlash against John in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as he might have anticipated. I have no doubt that some of the negative publicity John drew helped to account for his moods of depression, which in turn provoked drinking, and driving while drinking—recklessly, on the motorcycle that would eventually kill him, in an accident on a graveled country road near his home in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, in 1982.

  At the time of his death, John had been divorced from two wives, and was about to marry another, a much younger woman writer, a former student of his at SUNY-Binghamton.

  I remember first hearing of John’s death. I’d been invited to give a reading at the Princeton Public Library, and my librarian-hostess told me the shocking news: “John Gardner is dead.” Not for a moment did I think that this John Gardner might be the other Gardner, a writer of popular mysteries; I’d known immediately that this Gardner was my western–New York friend. And I’d known, or seemed to know, that John’s death (at the age of forty-nine) would turn out to be both accidental and—perhaps, to a degree—self-willed.

  What would John Gardner’s life be now, if he hadn’t drunk so heavily? So compulsively, like a fated character out of Dostoyevsky or Eugene O’Neill? If he hadn’t succumbed to an alcoholic’s wildly inflated vision of himself—in which he saw his destiny loom large in the writing of the “great American novel” that would “alter the consciousness” of his time? My most vivid m
emories are of John hugging me, hard. This was John’s customary greeting, as it was John’s customary farewell. I remember John kissing my cheek, smelling of whiskey—his silvery hair falling disheveled to his broad, slightly rounded shoulders, his gesturing hands edged with grime, like fingerless gloves. I remember the glisten of his eyes, and the sharp smell of his smoldering pipe: “Joyce, you know that we’re as good as—maybe better than—Lawrence, don’t you? Lawrence, Joyce—Faulkner—we are their equals, or will be. You know that, don’t you? Come on!”

  Early Influences. Often it’s said that the only influences that matter greatly to us come early in our lives, and I think that this must be so. Of the thousands—tens of thousands?—of books I’ve probably read, in part or entirely, many of which have surely exerted some very real influence on my writing life, only a few shimmer with a sort of supernatural significance, like the brightest stars in the firmament: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and The Gold Bug and Other Stories by Edgar Allan Poe—the great books of my childhood.

  Add to which, in early adolescence, at a time when I borrowed books from the Lockport Public Library each Saturday when my mother drove into town to shop for groceries, such thrilling titles as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—the great books of a more self-consciously literary era in my life.

  Of course as a student I had influential teachers—a succession of wonderfully encouraging, inspiring and insightful teachers both at Williamsville High School, in Williamsville, New York, and at Syracuse University, from which I graduated in 1960. As a child, I attended a one-room schoolhouse in rural Niagara County, New York, north of Buffalo, of which I’ve written elsewhere—a hardscrabble “education experience” that has provided useful memories of the kind we all retrieve and hone for nostalgic purposes but not an education of which one might reasonably boast, still less present as ideal or “influential” in any significant way. (My memory of our Amazonian teacher Mrs. Dietz, confronted with the rebelliousness and general obtrusiveness of six-foot-tall farm boys with no love of book learning or even of sitting still for more than a few minutes at a time, approaches the succinctness of Faulkner’s terse encomium for the black housekeeper, Dilsey: They endured.)

  If I had a single mentor who guided me into my writing life—or at any rate encouraged me—it wasn’t any of my teachers, wonderful though they were, or any of my university colleagues in the years to come, but my grandmother Blanche Woodside, my father’s mother. (“Oates” was the name of my grandmother’s first husband.) In our not-very-prosperous farmhouse in Millersport, New York, at the northern edge of Erie County near the Erie Barge Canal, there were no books at all—not even a Bible. (How curious this was wouldn’t occur to me until I was much older. Though eventually my parents converted to Catholicism after the sudden, premature death of my mother’s father, when I was in junior high school, the household of my early, formative years was utterly without religion of any kind—the prevailing tone of secular skepticism was set by both my mother’s father, a Hungarian immigrant who worked in a steel foundry in Tonawanda and as a village blacksmith at home in Millersport, and by my father, Fred Oates, who’d had to drop out of grade school to help support his mother after his father, Carleton Oates, abandoned them in or about 1917.) Along with articles of clothing she’d sewed or knitted for me, my grandmother gave me books for Christmas and my birthday, year after year; when I was fourteen, inspired by my predilection for filling tablet after tablet with my school-girl handwriting and drawings, in the way of a budding serial novelist, my grandmother stunned my parents and me by giving me a Remington portable typewriter for my birthday!—an astonishing gift, considering that my grandmother had very little money and that typewriters were virtually unheard-of in rural households like ours.

  Most of the children’s storybooks and young-adult novels my grandmother gave me have faded from my memory, like the festive holiday occasions themselves. The great single—singular—book of my childhood, if not of my entire life, is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which my grandmother gave me when I was eight years old, and which, with full-page illustrations by John Tenniel, in a slightly oversized edition with a transparent plastic cover, exerted a powerful influence on my susceptible child’s imagination, a kind of hypnotic spell that lasted for years.

  Here is my springboard into the imagination! Here is my model of what a storybook can be.

  I was too young for such exalted thoughts, of course. Far too young even to grasp that the name stamped on the spine of the book—Lewis Carroll—was the author’s name, still less that it was the author’s pen name. (Many years would pass before I became aware that the author of the Alice books was an Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson, an eccentric bachelor with a predilection for telling fantastical stories to the young daughters of his Oxford colleagues and photographing them in suggestive and seductive poses evocative of Humbert Humbert’s nymphets of a later, less innocent era.) My enchantment with this gift began with the book itself as a physical and aesthetic object, quite unlike anything else in our household: both Alice books were published in a single volume under the imprint Illustrated Junior Library, Grosset & Dunlap (1946). Immediately, the striking illustrations by John Tenniel entered my imagination, ranged across the field of the book’s cover—back and front—in a dreamlike assemblage of phantasmagoric figures as in a somewhat less malevolent landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. (I still have this book. It is one of the precious possessions in my library. What a surprise to discover that the book that loomed so large in my childhood imagination is only slightly larger than an ordinary book.)

  The appeal of Alice and her bizarre adventures to an eight-year-old girl in a farming community in upstate New York is obvious. Initially, the little-girl reader is likely to be struck by the fact that the story’s heroine is a girl of her own approximate age who confronts extraordinary adventures with admirable equanimity, common sense, and courage. (We know that Alice isn’t much more than eight years old because Humpty-Dumpty says slyly to her that she might have “left off” at seven—meaning, Alice might have died at seven.) Like most children, Alice talks to herself—but not in the silly prattling way of most children: “‘Come, there’s no use in crying like that!’ said Alice to herself rather sharply; ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’” (Obviously, Alice is echoing adult admonitions—she has interiorized the stoicism of her elders.) Instead of being alarmed or terrified, as a normal child would be, Alice marvels, “Curiouser and curiouser!”—as if the world so fraught with shape-changing and threats of dissolution and even, frequently, cannibalism were nothing more than a puzzle to be solved or a game to be played like croquet, cards, or chess. (Alice discovers that the Looking-Glass world is a continual game of chess in which, by pressing forward, and not backing down in her confrontations with Looking-Glass inhabitants, she will become Queen Alice—though it isn’t a very comfortable state pinioned between two elderly snoring queens.) The Alice books are gold mines of aphoristic instruction: “Who cares for you?…You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Alice cries fearlessly, nullifying the authority of malevolent adults as, at the harrowing conclusion of Looking-Glass, she confronts the taboo-fact of “cannibalism” at the heart of civilization:

  [The Pudding] was so large that [Alice] couldn’t help feeling a little shy with it, as she had been with the mutton; however, she conquered her shyness by a great effort, and cut a slice and handed it to the Red Queen.

  “What impertinence!” said the Pudding. “I wonder how you’d like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!”

  It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn’t a word to say in reply; she could only sit and look at it and gasp.

  The banquet dissolves into nightmare as the White Queen seizes Alice’s ha
ir in both hands and screams “Take care of yourself!…Something’s going to happen!”

  There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup ladle was walking up the table toward Alice’s chair…“I can’t stand this any longer!” [Alice] cried, as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands; one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

  Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are brilliantly imagined fantasies that shade by degrees into nightmare—only to be routed by Alice’s impetuousness and quick thinking. The child reader is meant to take solace in the possibility that, like Alice, she can exorcise adult vanity and cruelty; she may be very young, and very small, but she can assert herself if she knows how. Both Alice nightmares end with Alice simply waking up—returned to a comfortable domestic world of kittens and tea things—and no adults in sight.

  In essence, I think I am, still, this child-self so like an American cousin of Lewis Carroll’s Alice: my deepest, most yearning and most (naively) hopeful self. I think that I am still waiting to be “influenced”—by a loving mentor, or even a monster. By someone.

  Who?

  REVISITING LOCKPORT, NEW YORK

  Writers, particularly novelists, are inextricably linked to place. It’s impossible to think of Charles Dickens and not to think of Dickens’s London; impossible to think of James Joyce and not to think of Joyce’s Dublin; and so with Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor—each is inextricably linked to a region, as to a language-dialect of particular sharpness, vividness, idiosyncrasy. We are all regionalists in our origins, however “universal” our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root—almost literally.