Finding

Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, “to look for Indian arrows.” Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.

We took along, from time to time, those people who expressed an interest in finding Indian arrows. Most of them, I expect, wanted an excuse for an outing. We thought of all neighbors, friends, and business associates in terms of whether they were good company or utter nuisances on our expeditions. Surely all of my attitudes toward people were shaped here, all unknowing. I learned that there are people who see nothing, who would not have noticed the splendidest of tomahawks if they had stepped on it, who could not tell a worked stone from a shard of flint or quartz, people who did not feel the excitement of the whoop we all let out when we found an arrowhead or rim of pottery with painting or incised border on it, a pot leg, or those major discoveries which we remembered and could recite forever afterward, the finding of an intact pipe, perfect celt, or unbroken spearhead elegantly core-chipped, crenulated and notched as if finished yesterday. “I’ve found one!” the cry would go up from the slope of a knoll, from the reaches of a plowed field, a gully. One never ran over; that was bad form. One kept looking with feigned nonchalance, and if one’s search drew nigh the finder, it was permissible to ask to see. Daddy never looked at what other people found until we were back at the car. “Nice.” he would say, or “That’s really something.” Usually he grunted, for my sister and I would have a fistful of tacky quartz arrowheads, lumpish and halfheartedly worked. Or we would have a dubious pointed rock which we had made out to be an arrowhead and which Daddy would extract from our plunder and toss out the car window.

These excursions were around the upper Savannah valley, out from places like Heardmont, Georgia, a ghost town in the thirties; Ware Shoals, South Carolina; Coronaca (passing through which my grandmother Davenport always exclaimed, “Forty years come on Cornelia!” and to my knowledge no one ever asked her why, and now we shall never know), Calhoun Falls, Abbeville, and a network of crossroads (usually named for their cotton gins), pecan groves, and “wide places in the road” like Iva, Starr, and Good Hope Community. The best looking was in autumn, when crops were in and frost had splintered the fields. It was then that arrowheads sat up on tees of red earth, a present to us all. A stone that has worked its way to the surface will remain on a kind of pedestal, surrounding topsoil having been washed away. These finds were considered great good fortune. “Just sitting right up there!” was the phrase. But these were usually tiny bird arrowheads in blue flint. Things worth finding were embedded, a telltale serif only showing. It was Daddy who found these. My best find was a round stone the size of a quarter, thick as three quarters, with Brancusi-like depressions on each surface, as if for forefinger and thumb. I’d thought it was the stone on which Indians twirled a stick with a bowstring, to make fire, yet the depressions did not seem to have been designed for that, or caused by it.

Years later, at Harvard, I took the stone, at Daddy’s suggestion, around to an Indianologist at the Peabody Museum. He looked at it and laughed. Then he pulled open a drawer full of similar stones. What were they for? “We don’t know,” sighed the Indianologist. My father’s guess that they were counters for some gambling game was probably right. The Cherokee whose stone artifacts we collected from their hunting grounds and campsites were passionate gamblers, and would stake squaw and papoose on a throw of the dice if all else were lost.

These Sunday searches were things all to themselves, distinctly a ritual whose sacrum had tacit and inviolable boundaries. Other outings, long forays into the chinquapin and hickory forests of Abbeville County, were for the pleasure of the walk and the odd pineknot, rich in turpentine, that one might pick up for the fire. There were summer drives for finding hog plums, wild peaches, and blackberries on the most abandoned of back dirt roads, autumn drives in search of muscadines and scuppernongs, the finding of which, gnarled high in trees like lianas, wanted as sharp an eye as an arrowhead. We were a foraging family, completely unaware of our passion for getting at things hard to find. I collected stamps, buttons, the cards that came with chewing gum, and other detritus, but these were private affairs with nothing of the authority of looking for Indian arrowheads.

Childhood is spent without introspection, in unreflective innocence. Adolescence turns its back on childhood in contempt and sometimes shame. We find our childhood later, and what we find in it is full of–astounding surprises. As Proust has shown us, and Freud, its moments come back to us according to strange and inexplicable laws. If there is a penny on the sidewalk, I find it; I normally pick up seven or eight cents a week (I walk everywhere, rejecting the internal combustion engine as an effete surrender to laziness and the ignoble advantage of convenience), together with perfectly good pencils, firewood, and the rare dime. At Fiesole, when I should have been admiring the view, I unearthed with my toe a Mussolini nickel.

It is now shocking to me that I realized so few connections between things as a child. I vividly remember reading a book about Leonardo, and remember the important detail of his finding seashells in the mountains, but I thought that wonderful, wholly beyond my scope, failing to see any similarity between my amateur archaeology and Leonardo’s. What controlled this severe compartmentalization of ideas was my sense of place. Books were read by the fire or by the Franklin heater in the kitchen; in the summer, under the fig tree, and what one read in books remained in the place where one read them. It did not occur to me that any of my teachers at school had ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci any more than of Tarzan, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, or the Toonerville Trolley, all of which were lumped together in my head as privacies in which no one else could be in the least interested.

The schoolroom was its own place, our home another, the red fields of the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people’s houses: all were as distinct as continents in disparate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were insisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport’s (thus her accepted name after its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, she said, patently illogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time), and no dime could ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion (Flash Gordon, Tarzan) for these places were humbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be financed by a grandmother who knew her own mind.

Nor could the movies be mentioned at Grandmother Fant’s, for attending them meant going into public, a low thing that the Fants have never done. The Fants were French Huguenots, from Bordeaux. They were a kind of Greek tragedy in the third of a great trilogy. Once they were rich with two ships that bore South Carolina cotton from Charleston to France. The United States Navy sank them both in the time of the War–there was a tale we heard over and over of Grandfather Sassard going down with the Edisto, standing impassively on her bridge, a New Testament clutched to his breast, his right arm saluting the colors of the Confederacy, which were soon to follow him beneath the waves of the Atlantic. His brother wore a friendship ring given him by Fitzhugh Lee, and this sacred ornament would be got out of a kind of jewel casket and shown to us. I don’t think I ever dared touch it.

After the War my grandmother, born and raised in Charleston (she never said “the Yankees,” but “the stinking Yankees,” the one unladylike locution she ever allowed herself), married a Fant, who took her to Florida to homestead. There my uncles Paul and Silas were born with teeth, it was always pointed out, two tiny pink teeth each, for this was the signum of their fate. As they lay in their cradle a catamount sprang through the window and ate them. Sometimes it was an alligator that crawled into the house and ate them. As Granny Fant reached a matriarchal age, her stories began to develop structural variants. She used to ask me never to forget that we are descended from Sir Isaac Davis though I have never been able to discover who Sir Isaac Davis was. Through him we were related to Queen Anne. And the stinking Yankees stole her wedding ring and gave it to the Holmans’ cook, who wore it a day of glory and then returned it to Miss Essy.

Nor could I sing “The Birmingham Jail” at Granny Fant’s, as Uncle Jamie had once spent a night in that place. Nor could we (later on, in adolescence) mention new births in Uncle Jamie’s presence, for at forty he still did not know the facts of life, and Granny fant was determined to keep up the illusion that humanity is restocked by the stork. She was, as my father and I discovered to our amazement, wrong. It turned out that Jamie thought pregnancy came about by the passage of a testicle into some unthinkable orifice of the female. He remarked reflectively that if he’d married he could only have had two children. “And I don’t think I could have stood the pain.”

Nor could we mention looking for arrowheads–the thought that her daughter, son-in-law, and their children walked all over fields and meadows in public would have sent Granny Fant to her bed with a vinegar rag across her forehead. My point is that throughout my childhood place determined mood and tone. My schoolteachers knew nothing of our archaeology. Certainly the Misses Anna and Lillie Brown would somehow disapprove; they were genteel. I cannot remember any mention whatever of history in grammar school. All we learned of the Civil War is that our principal, Miss May Russell, was taken from her bed and kissed as an infant by the notorious renegade Manse Jolly, who had, to Miss May’s great satisfaction, galloped his horse down the length of a banquet table at which Union officers were dining, collapsing it as he progressed, emptying two sixshooters into the Yankees and yodeling, “Root hog or die!” This was the rebel yell that Douglas Southall Freeman gave for a recording and dropped dead at the end of. This grotesque fact would not have fazed Miss May Russell; what finer way would a gentleman wish to die? We all had to learn it: the root is pitched on a drunken high note in the flattest of whining cotton-planter’s pronunciation, the hawg is screamed in an awful way, and the aw dah is an hysterical crescendo recalling Herod’s soldiery at work on male infants. We loved squawling it, and were told to remember how the day was saved at Bull Run, when Beauregard and Johnson were in a sweat until the Sixth South Carolina Volunteers under Wade Hampton rode up on the left flank (they had assembled, in red shirts, around our own court house and marched away to Virginia to “The Palmyra Schottische”).

But school was school, as church was church and houses were houses. What went on in one never overflowed into any other. I was perfectly capable in Sunday school of believing all the vicious bilge they wallowed in, and at home studying with glee the murders in the old Sunday American, and then spending the afternoon hunting arrowheads. After which came Jack Benny, and a chapter or two of Sir Walter Scott. To have mentioned religion while hunting Indian arrows would have been a breach of manners beyond conception or belief, insanity itself.

The rule was: everything in its place. To this day I paint in one part of my bouse, write in another, read in another; read, in fact, in two others: frivolous and delicious reading such as Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner in one room, scholarship in another. And when I am away from home, I am somebody else. This may seem suspicious to the simple mind of a psychiatrist, but it seems natural enough. My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I’m not supposed to know him, either.

Shaw has Joan of Arc say that if everybody stayed at home, they would be good people. It is being in France that makes the English soldiers such devils. She and Shaw have a real point. A dog is a Turk only in his own yard. I am a professor only when I arrive in the classroom; I can feel the Jekyll–Hyde syndrome flick into operation. I have suffered the damnation of a heretic in rooms uncongenial and threatening. It takes a while to make a place for oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. It can be done; man can do anything. I have read Mann’s Joseph novels beside the world’s loudest jukebox in the recreation room of the XVIII Airborne Corps. A colleague remembers reading Tolstoy behind the field guns on Guadalcanal; another finished reading all of Shakespeare at the Battle of Kohima. Scholars took their work with them to the trenches in the First World War; Apollinaire was reading a critical journal when the shrapnel sprayed into his head. He saw the page all red before he felt the wound. Napoleon took a carriage of books with him to Waterloo. Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow’s blood.

How capable we are off our turf (”far afield,” “lost,” “no place for me,” the phrases run) may be one of the real tests of our acumen. I am a bad traveller. Even away from home with my family I could suffer acute nostalgia as a child. I know of no desolation like that of being in an uncongenial place, and I associate all travel with the possibility of uncongeniality—the Greyhound bus terminal in Knoxville with its toilets awash with urine and vomit, its abominable food and worst coffee in the universe (and their rule is that the more unpalatable the food, the higher the price), its moronic dispatchers, and the hordes of vandals in tight pink trousers and sleeveless T-shirts who patrol the place with vicious aimlessness; all airports; all meetings of any sort without exception; cocktail parties; lawn parties; dinner parties; speeches.

Some slackness of ritual, we are told, that hurt the feelings of the dii montes, the gnomes of the hills, allowed Rome to fall to the barbarians. These gods of place were genii, spirits of a place. All folklore knows them, and when a hero died who had wound his fate with that of a place, he joined its genii and thereafter partook of its life. Our word “congeniality” means kinship with the soul of a place, and places have souls in a way very like creatures.

In hunting Indian arrowheads we were always, it seemed, on congenial territory, though we were usually on somebody’s land. We could trust them to know we were there; country people have suspicious eyes. My father was raised in the country and knew what to do and what not to do. Rarely would a farmer stroll out, in the way of peering at the weather or the road, and find out what we were up to. Likely as not, he would have some arrowheads back at the house and would give them to us. Never sell, give. He would be poorer than poor, but he would not sell a piece of rock.

Here at these unpainted clapboard sharecropper houses we would be invited to have a dipper of water from the well, cold, clean and toothsome. Sometimes a sweet-potato biscuit would be served by the lady of the house, a tall woman in an apron and with the manners of an English lady from the counties. We children would ask to see the pigs. Country people were a different nation, both black and white, and they exhibited mores long remembered. There was once an elder daughter who retired to a corner and tied herself into a knot of anguish. We assumed idiocy, as country people do not send their demented off to an asylum. But the mother explained, with simplicity, “She has been lewd, and she thinks you can see it in her.”

And once we found a black family with our name, and traded family histories, blacks being as talkative and open as poor whites are silent and reticent, until we discovered that their folk had belonged to ours. Whereupon we were treated as visiting royalty; a veritable party was made of it, and when we were leaving, an ancient black Davenport embraced my father with tears in his eyes. “O Lord, Marse Guy,” he said, “don’t you wish it was the good old slavery times again!”

What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoudy in its midst, aromatic stands of rabbit tobacco, beggar’s lice, lizards, the inevitable mute snake, always just leaving as you come upon him, hawks, buzzards, abandoned orchards rich in apples, peaches or plums.

Thoreauvian, because these outings, I was to discover, were very like his daily walks, with a purpose that covered the whole enterprise but was not serious enough to make the walk a chore or a duty. Thoreau, too, was an Indian-arrowhead collector, if collector is the word. Once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them. Some men came from the Smithsonian and were given what they chose, and sometimes a scout troop borrowed some for a display at the county fair. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.

When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at work, I felt perfectly at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and wondered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must have their range from good to bad, like arrowheads and stone axes.

And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing. My family, praises be unto the gods, never inspected anything that we enjoyed doing; criticism was strictly for adversities, and not very much for them. Consequently I spent my childhood drawing, building things, writing, reading, playing, dreaming out loud, without the least comment from anybody. I learned later that I was thought not quite bright, for the patterns I discovered for myself were not things with nearby models. When I went off to college it was with no purpose whatsoever: no calling in view, no profession, no ambition.

Ambition was scorned by the Fants and unknown to the Davenports. That my father worked with trains was a glory that I considered a windfall, for other fathers sold things or processed things. If I am grateful for the unintentional education of having been taught how to find things (all that I have ever done, I think, with texts and pictures), I am even more grateful, in an inconsequential way, for my father’s most astounding gift of all: being put at the throttle of a locomotive one night and allowed to drive it down the track for a whole five minutes. I loved trains, and grew up with them. I had drawn locomotives with the passion of Hokusai drawing Fujiyama. My wagon had been an imaginary locomotive more than it had been a rocket ship or buckboard. And here we were meeting the Blue Ridge one summer evening, and my father must have seen the look in my eyes as I peered into the cab of the engine. Suddenly I was lifted onto the step, and helped by the engineer—I believe his name was Singbell—into the ineffably important seat. The engine was merely switching cars in the yard, but it was my ten-year-old hand on the throttle that shoved the drivers and turned the wheels and sent plumes of steam hissing outward. Life has been downhill ever since.

But this is not the meaning of looking for Indian arrowheads. That will, I hope, elude me forever. Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake. I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy.

Yet it was the seeding of all sorts of things, of scholarship, of a stoic sense of pleasure (I think we were all bored and ill at ease when we went on official vacations to the mountains or the shore, whereas out arrowhead-looking we were content and easy), and most of all of foraging, that prehistoric urge still not bred out of man. There was also the sense of going out together but with each of us acting alone. You never look for Indian arrows in pairs. You fan out. But you shout discoveries and comments (”No Indian was ever around here!”) across fields. It was, come to think of it, a humanistic kind of hunt. My father never hunted animals, and I don’t think he ever killed anything in his life. All his brothers were keen huntsmen; I don’t know why he wasn’t. And, conversely, none of my uncles would have been caught dead doing anything so silly as looking for hours and hours for an incised rim of pottery or a Cherokee pipe.

I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer. My father became so good at spotting arrowheads that on roads with likely gullies he would find them from the car. Or give a commentary on what we might pick up were we to stop: “A nice spearhead back there by a maypop, but with the tip broken off.”

And it is all folded away in an irrevocable past. Most of our fields are now the bottom of a vast lake. Farmers now post their land and fence it with barbed wire. Arrowhead collecting has become something of a minor hobby, and shops for the tourist trade make them in a back room and sell them to people from New Jersey. Everything is like that nowadays. I cherish those afternoons, knowing that I will never understand all that they taught me. As we grew up, we began not to go on the expeditions. Not the last, but one of the last, afternoons found us toward sunset, findings in hand, ending up for the day with one of our rituals, a Coca-Cola from the icebox of a crossroads store. “They tell over the radio,” the proprietor said, “that a bunch of Japanese airplanes have blowed up the whole island of Hawaii.”

[Archive]

LEONARD MICHAELS

Fiction

Jealousy

March 1997

After a Fight, from Sylvia

December 1992

Essays

The Action of Metaphor

January 1987

Literary Talk

December 1987

Diary of an Ex

December 1989



WYATT MASON

The Irresponsibility of Feelings, on Leonard Michaels

A followup interview

My Father

By Leonard Michaels

Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment. He returned after dark. The family ate dinner together on Sundays and Jewish holidays. Mainly he ate alone. I don’t remember him staying home from work because of illness or bad weather. He took few vacations. Once we spent a week in Miami and he tried to enjoy himself, wading into the ocean, being brave, stepping inch by inch into the warm blue unpredictable immensity. Then he slipped. In water no higher than his pupik, he came up thrashing, struggling back up the beach on skinny white legs. “I nearly drowned,” he said, very exhilarated. He never went into the water again. He preferred his barbershop to the natural world; retiring, after thirty-five years, only when his hands trembled too much for scissors and razors, and angina made it impossible for him to stand for hours at a time. Then he took walks in the neighborhood, carrying a vial of whiskey in his shirt pocket. When pain stopped him in the street, he’d stand very still and sip his whiskey. A few times I stood beside him, as still as he, waiting for the pain to end, both of us speechless and frightened.

He was vice-president of his synagogue, keeping records, attending to the maintenance of the building. He spoke Yiddish, Polish, maybe some Russian, and had the Hebrew necessary for prayers. He spoke to me in Yiddish until, at about the age of six, I began speaking to him mainly in English. When he switched from one language to the other, I’d rarely notice. He could play the violin and mandolin. As a youth in Poland, he’d been in a band. When old friends visited our apartment, he’d drink a shnaps with them. He smoked cigars and pipes. He read the Yiddish newspaper, the Forward, and the Daily News. He voted Democratic but had no faith in politicians, political systems, or “the people.” Aside from family, work, and synagogue, his passion was friends. My mother reminded me, when I behaved badly, of his friends. She’d say, “Nobody will like you.” Everybody liked Leon Michaels.

He was slightly more than five feet tall. My mother is barely five feet. Because I’m five nine, she thinks I’m a giant. My father came from Drohiczyn (Dro-hee-chin), a town on the river Bug near the Russian border. When I visited Poland in 1979, I asked my hosts about Drohiczyn. They said, “You’ll see new buildings and Russian troops. No reason to go there.” I didn’t go there. It would have been a sentimental experience, essentially empty. My father never talked about the town, rarely said anything about his past. We also never had deep talks of the father-and-son kind, but when I was fifteen I fell in love and he said a memorable thing to me.

The girl had many qualities–tall, blond, talented musician–but mainly she wasn’t Jewish. My father learned about her when we were seen together watching a basketball game at Madison Square Garden, among eighteen thousand people. I’d been foolish to suppose I could go to the Garden with a blonde and not be spotted. My father had many friends. You saw them in his barbershop, “the boys,” snazzy dressers jingling coins in their pockets or poor Jews from the neighborhood who came just to sit, to rest in their passage between miseries. Always a crowd in the barbershop–cabdrivers, bookies, waiters, salesmen. One of them spotted me and phoned my father. When I returned that night, he was waiting up with the fact. He said we would discuss it in the morning.

I lay awake in anguish. No way to deny the girl I loved. I’d been seeing her secretly for months. Her parents knew about the secrecy. I was so ashamed of it that when I called for her I’d ring the bell and then wait in the street. She urged me to come upstairs, meet her parents. After a while, I did. They understood. Her previous boyfriend was the son of a rabbi.

In the morning my father said, “Let’s take a walk.” We walked around the block, then around the block again, in silence. It took a long time, but the silence was so dense it felt like one infinitely heavy immobilized minute. Then, as if he’d rehearsed a speech and dismissed it, he sighed. “I’ll dance at your wedding.”

Thus we spent a minute together, father and son, and he said a memorable thing. It is concise, its burden huge. If witty, it’s in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, making a picture of demonic gaiety. My wedding takes place in the middle of the night. My father is a small figure among dancing Jews, frenzied with joy.

For a fifteen-year-old in love, this sentence was a judgment, punishment, and release from brutal sanctions. He didn’t order me not to see her. I could do as I pleased. As it happened, she met someone else and broke up with me. I was very hurt. I was also relieved. My father danced at my wedding, twelve years later, when I married Sylvia. Black-haired. Dark-skinned. Jew. Because her parents were dead, the ceremony was held in our apartment. Her aunts and uncles sat along one wall, mine along another. The living room was small. Conversation, forced by closeness, was lively and nervous. The rabbi, delayed by traffic, arrived late, and the ceremony was hurried. Everyone seemed to shout instructions. Did she circle me or I her? My father was delighted. When Sylvia and I fought, which was every day, she’d sometimes threaten to tell my father the truth about me. “It will kill him,” she said.

I’d tried once to talk to him about our trouble. He wouldn’t hear it. “She’s an orphan. You cannot abandon her.”

If he ever hit me, I don’t remember it, but I remember being malicious. My brother, three years younger than I, was practicing scales on my father’s violin. When he finished, he started to carry the violin across the room. I put out my foot. He tripped, fell. We heard the violin hit the floor and crack. Quicker than instantly, I wanted to undo the act, not trip my brother. But it was done. I was stuck with myself. I think I smiled. My father looked at the violin and said, “I had it over twenty years.”

Maybe I tripped my brother because I’m tone-deaf. I can’t learn to play a musical instrument. Nothing forgives me. I wish my father had become enraged, knocked off my head, so I could forget the incident. I never felt insufficiently loved, and yet I think: When Abraham raised the knife to Isaac, the kid had it good.

In photos, however badly lit or ill-focused, my father looks like himself. I never look like myself. This isn’t me, I think. Like a baby, my father is inevitably himself.

My father never owned a car or flew in an airplane. He imagined no alternatives to being himself. He had his family, his friends, his neighborhood, synagogue, and the hectic variety of human traffic in the barbershop and the streets. Looking out my window above San Francisco Bay, I think how my father saw only Monroe Street, Madison Street, and Clinton Street. For thirty-five years, he walked to work.

I was in London, returning from three months in Paris, when he died. My flight to New York had been canceled. I was stranded, waiting for another flight. Nobody in New York knew where I was. I couldn’t be phoned. The day after the funeral, I arrived. My brother met me at the door of the apartment and told me the news. I went alone to my parents’ bedroom and sat on the bed. I didn’t want to be seen crying.

A great number of people visited the apartment to offer condolences and to reminisce. Then a rabbi came, a tiny, fragile man dressed in black, with a white beard twice the length of his face. It looked like the top of his shirt. He asked my mother to give him some of my father’s clothes, particularly things he’d worn next to his skin, because he was a good man, very rare. As the rabbi started to leave with a bundle of clothes in his arms, he noticed me sitting at the kitchen table. He said in Yiddish, “Sit lower.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at. Did he want me to crouch? I was somehow susceptible to criticism.

My mother interceded. “He feels,” she said. “He feels plenty.”

“I didn’t ask how he feels. Tell him to sit lower.”

I got up and left the kitchen, looking for a lower place to sit. I was very angry but not enough to start yelling at a fanatical midget. Besides, he was correct.

One Friday night, I was walking to the subway on Madison Street. My winter coat was open, flying with my stride. I wore a white shirt and a sharp red tie. I’d combed my hair in the style of the day, a glorious pompadour fixed and sealed with Vaseline. I was nineteen-years-old-terrific. The night was cold, but I was hot. The wind was strong. My hair was stronger. It gleamed like black, polished rock. As I entered the darkness below the Manhattan Bridge, where it strikes across Madison Street and makes a high, gloomy, mysterious vault, I met my father. He was returning from the barbershop, following his usual route. His coat was buttoned to the chin, his hat pulled down to protect his eyes. He stopped. As I approached, I saw him study me, his creation. We stood for a moment beneath the bridge, facing each other in the darkness and wind. An American giant, five feet nine inches tall. A short Polish Jew. He said, “Button your coat. Everybody doesn’t have to see your tie.”

I buttoned my coat.

“Why don’t you wear a hat?”

I sighed. “I’m all right.”

“You need a haircut. You look like a bum.”

“I’ll come to the barbershop tomorrow.”

He nodded, as if to say “Good night” and “What’s the use.” He was on his way home to dinner, to sleep. He’d worked all day. I was on my way to sexual adventure. Then he asked, “Do you need money?”

“No.”

“Here,” he said, pulling coins from his coat pocket. “For the subway. Take.”

He gave.

I took.

My acquaintance with Emerson began in the fall or winter of 1866, when he came to Quincy to deliver a lecture at the invitation of the “Encore Club,” of which I was President. I was at that time living with my father, Rev. S. H. Emery, who was an Orthodox Congregational minister and pastor of a Quincy church. He very cordially assented to my desire to invite Mr. Emerson to take supper with us and Mr. Emerson graciously accepted our invitation. My father asked Mr. Emerson to say Grace (quite to my horror), but Mr. Emerson immediately responded, as I have noted elsewhere.

I have never forgotten some of the incidents of the lecture. A traveling doctor (one Dr. O’Leary) had engaged the hall subsequently to our engagement for the Emerson lecture, for a two weeks’ course, and on account of our previous engagement was obliged to suspend for one evening. He had some cheap paintings, evidently reproductions from photographs, of a number of important persons and among others, of Emerson. As his lectures were free and of a popular sort, the hall was crowded every night with a class of auditors, who for the most part, had probably never heard of Emerson; but Dr. O’Leary the night previous to the one on which Emerson was to lecture, paid Mr. Emerson such high compliments and so urged the attendance of his audience at the lecture of next evening, that to our very great surprise there was hardly standing room left. The doctor had improvised a raised platform at the other end of the hall from the regular stage and Mr. Emerson spoke from this platform, which consisted mainly of loose boards, and Emerson’s form of emphasis, by raising himself on his toes and settling back, resulted in unusual commotion. My remembrance is that the subject was “Immortality.”

After the lecture I went with Mr. Emerson to his room at the hotel, where he talked delightfully as long as I dared to stay.

The apothems which I enclose are what I could remember and jot down next day of his sayings that evening.

I asked him for his autograph and he wrote:

So near is grandeur to our dust—

  So nigh is God to man,

When duty whispers low thou must

  The youth replies I can.

I was familiar with his writings before this meeting and I respected him as a teacher, but my very great admiration and respect for him personally began then and have gained in strength ever since.

He came once more to Quincy to lecture, on my invitation, and this time he was accompanied by Miss Ellen.

In 1879 I went to Concord and resided there until 1887. During the early years of my residence I met Emerson frequently, and he was uniformly courteous, as was his wont to all men.

One of the very pleasantest things ever said to me was said by Emerson when I met him one morning near the little school-house then at the corner of Main Street near the Fitchburg station:

“It was a good compliment to this town, your coming here to live.”

The last time he read one of his lectures to an audience was at a meeting at my home in the Chamberlaine house, before my own house was completed. I sat by his side while he read and shall never forget my enjoyment of that evening. Mr. Emerson prefaced his sentence as to what the Soul says to Death by relating this incident:

“The lady who afterward married Charles Sumner was at the time of the War of the Rebellion a very ardent supporter of the North, and soon after the attack on Sumter, she met on a Boston street an acquaintance who favored a compromise with the South. As they met, the gentleman addressed her cordially, holding out his hand for the customary greeting, whereupon the lady drew herself up proudly and said, ‘I don’t know you, Sir.’” That, said Mr. Emerson, is what the Soul says unto Death—”I don’t know you, Sir.”

I have said often, and am glad to repeat, that he was the finest gentleman I ever met. Just to meet him on the street and receive from him the simplest greeting was an inspiration never to be forgotten.

Sayings of Emerson at Quincy.

Mr. Emerson’s Grace at our house in 1866:

   “Spirit of all good, we invoke thy blessing.”

Are we as near to God as we ever shall be?

Yes—Potentially—that is—it is in our power to be.

Illuminees are more commonly found among women than men.

I call Bronson Alcott my test of minds. Carlyle with his English butcher-prejudice, or an affectation of it, calls him a “potato maniac” ; for Alcott is what is sometimes called a vegetarian—that is, he does not willingly eat meat.

The Good Spirit never ante-dates. He never gives us to-day what we shall need to-morrow.

The one Evil of the world is Blockheads, and wise men save it; without wise men the world would long ago have been bankrupt.

The Secret of Hegel is a rugged book—if one wants to practice intellectual gymnastics—cultivate intellectual muscle—let him read it if he has power and leisure to master it.

It is the rule that nations and races advance only by contact with other nations and races.

Agassiz is a Darwinian, notwithstanding that petulant, childish remark of his, totally unworthy of the man, with which he concluded a speech in Boston the other day—”We are not children of monkeys, but are children of God.”

When we look around upon the achievements of such souls as LaPlace and Newton, it seems to us that all which is in God is possible for us; we can make ourselves Archangels.

The simplest faith is the best. Socrates says—”The Daimon does not tell me what to do, but when I would do what I should not, the Daimon warns me.”

Soul creates body forever. Swedenborg was a good prophet and seer; he says, “I saw in Heaven streets and gardens, houses and stores and beautiful forms.”

Insanity is a safeguard (Swedenborg thinks); when by circumstances or even by the will, the pressure upon the soul is too great, the soul protects itself by insanity, which is a shield against undue pressure.

I believe in the Aesculapian theory, in the wonderful recuperative power of the soul. Agassiz will show you a lizard whose leg you can pluck off, or whose eye you may destroy and the little creature will replace them. This power of the lizard seems greater than that given to man in some directions : yet I believe the soul will in time cure any malady.

When Wendell Phillips delivers his learned lecture, The Lost Arts, it is a sort of irony. He says “If you will not let me speak about the events of to-day—the living things, a part of which I am—I will take you back 2000 years and more.”

It would be dangerous for us to say, ” All souls are immortal.” The soul may commit suicide, evil doing is death, and souls that do evil are dead.

Tis well to die if there be Gods,

Tis sad to live if there be none,

      said Marcus Aurelius.

These sayings of a single evening’s conversation, like those reported by C. J. Woodbury at Williams College, indicate how Emerson’s daily talk overflowed with thought. Though he wrote with care, and printed only after long consideration, Emerson was the readiest and most instructive talker, though never pressing forward into the place of pontiff. I read these pages in the Hillside Chapel, and they were novel to most of those present, although many of us had heard Emerson talk for years.

Document Dated July 27, 1969

by Philip Roth

The two-thousand-word document that follows is an example of a flourishing subliterary genre with a long and moving history, yet one that is all but unknown to the general public. It is a letter written by a novelist to a critic, but never mailed. I am the novelist, Diana Trilling is the critic, and it was not mailed for the reasons such letters rarely are mailed, or written, for that matter, other than in the novelist’s skull:

1. Writing (or imagining writing) the letter is sufficiently cathartic: by 4 or 5 A.M. the dispute has usually been settled to the novelist’s satisfaction and he can turn over and get a few hours’ sleep.

2. It is unlikely that the critic is about to have his reading corrected by the novelist anyway.

3. One does not wish to appear piqued in the least–let alone to be seething–neither to the critic nor to the public that follows these duels when they are conducted out in the open for all to see.

4. Where is it engraved in stone that a novelist shall feel himself to be “understood” any better than anyone else does?

5. The advice of friends and loved ones: “For God’s sake, forget it.”

So novelists–for all that they are by nature usually an obsessive and responsive lot–generally do forget it, or continually remind themselves that they ought to be forgetting it during the sieges of remembering. And, given the conventions that make a person feel like something of an ass if he does “stoop” to rebutting his critics, in the long run it may even be in the writer’s interest that he does forget it and goes on with his work. It is another matter as to whether it is in the interest of the literary culture that these inhibiting conventions have as much hold on us as they do, and that as a result the reviewer, critic, or book journalist generally finds himself in the comfortable position of a prosecution witness who, having given his testimony, need not face cross-examination by the defense.

July 27, 1969

Dear Mrs. Trilling:

I have just finished reading your essay-review in the August Harper’s, in which you compare the novel Portnoy’s Complaint to the book under review, J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself. If I may, I’d like to distinguish for you between myself and “Mr. Roth,” the character in your review who is identified as the “author of Portnoy’s Complaint.”

On the basis of your reading of his novel, you contend that “Mr. Roth” has a “position [he is] fortifying”; he is in this novel “telling us” things “by extension” about social determinism; he is, on the evidence of the novel, a “child of an indiscriminative mass society” as well as “representative…of post-Freudian American literary culture”; his “view of life” in the novel-as opposed to Ackerley’s in his memoir–does not “propose…the virtues of courage, kindliness, responsibility”; and his “view of life [is] grimly deterministic.”

Didactic, defiant, harsh, aggressively against, your “Mr. Roth” is a not uncommon sort of contemporary writer, and in view of the structure of your review, a perfect ficelle, aiding us in attaining a clearer vision of the issue you are dramatizing. Useful, however, as he may be as a rhetorical device, and clearly recognizable as a type, he is of course as much your invention as the Portnoys are mine. True, both “Mr. Roth” and I are Jews, but strong an identifying mark as that is, it is not enough, you will concede, to make us seem one and the same writer, especially as there is a pertinent dissimilarity to consider: the sum of our work, the accumulation of fictions from which the “positions” and “views” we hold might, with caution, be extrapolated.

Your “Mr. Roth” is a “young man from whom we can expect other books.” As I understand you, he has written none previous to the one you discuss, a book whose “showy” literary manner wherein he “achieves his effects by the broadest possible strokes”–is accounted for, if not dictated by, the fact that he is a “child of an indiscriminative mass society.” You describe him as an “accomplished … craftsman,” but so far, it would seem, strictly within the confines of his showy style.

Unlike “Mr. Roth,” I have over the past thirteen years published some dozen short stories, a novella, and three novels. one of the novels, published two years before “Mr. Roth’s” book, is as removed as a book could be from the spirit of Portnoy’s Complaint. If anything proves that I am not the “Mr. Roth” of your review, it is this novel, When She Was Good, for where “Mr. Roth’s” manner in his book is “showy,” mine here is deliberately ordinary and unobtrusive; where his work is “funny”–you speak of “fiercely funny self-revelation”–mine is proper and poker-faced; and where you find “Mr. Roth” on the basis of his book “representative … of post-Freudian American literary culture,” another critic of some prestige found me, on the basis of When She Was Good, to be hopelessly “retrograde.”

Admittedly, an alert reader familiar with both books might find in them a similar preoccupation with the warfare between parents and children. Reading your review, I was struck in fact by the following sentence–it almost seemed that you were about to compare Portnoy’s Complaint, not with J. R. Ackerley’s memoir, but with my own When She Was Good: “It turns out, however, that strangely different enterprises can proceed from the same premise. Portnoy, full of complaint because of his sexual fate, is bent on tracking down the source of his grievances…” Well, so too with my heroine, Lucy Nelson (if “sexual” is allowed its fullest meaning). Wholly antithetic in cultural and moral orientation, she is, in her imprisoning passion and in the role she assumes of the enraged offspring, very much his soul mate. I have even thought that, at some level of consciousness, “Mr. Roth’s” book might have developed as a complementary volume to my own. Though not necessarily “typical,” Alexander Portnoy and Lucy Nelson seem to me, in their extreme resentment and disappointment, like the legendary unhappy children out of two familiar American family myths. In one book it is the Jewish son railing against the seductive mother, in the other the Gentile daughter railing against the alcoholic father (equally loved, hated, and feared–the most unforgettable character she ever met). Of course, Lucy Nelson is seen to destroy herself within an entirely different fictional matrix, but that would result, among other reasons, from the enormous difference between the two environments that inspire their rage as well as their shared sense of loss and nostalgia.

I would also like to point out that the “virtues of courage, kindliness, responsibility” that “Mr. Roth” does not seem to you to “propose” in his book, are, in my own, proposed as a way of life in the opening pages of the novel and continue to haunt the book thereafter (or so I intended). Here is the sentence with which the book begins–it introduces the character of Willard Carroll, the grandfather in whose home the angry heroine is raised: “Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized–that was the dream of his life.” The chapter proceeds then to enlarge Willard’s idea of “civilization,” revealing through a brief family history how he has been able to practice the virtues of courage, kindliness, and responsibility, as he understands them. Only after Willard’s way has been sufficiently explored does the focus of the novel turn in stages toward Lucy, and to her zeal for what she takes to be a civilized life, what she understands courage to be and responsibility to mean, and the place she assigns to kindliness in combat.

Now I won’t claim that I am the one proposing those virtues here, since Daddy Will–as his family calls him–does not speak or stand for me in the novel any more than his granddaughter Lucy does. On this issue it may be that I am not so far from “Mr. Roth” after all, and that in my novel (as perhaps in his) virtues and values are “proposed” as they generally are in fiction–neither apart from the novel’s predominant concern nor in perfect balance with it, but largely through the manner of presentation: through what might be called the sensuous aspects of fiction–tone, mood, voice, and, among other things, the juxtaposition of the narrative events themselves.

“Grimly deterministic” I am not. There again “Mr. Roth” and I part company. You might even say that the business of choosing is the primary occupation of any number of my characters. I am thinking of souls even so mildly troubled as Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin, the protagonists of the novella Goodbye, Columbus, which I wrote some ten years before “Mr. Roth” appeared out of nowhere with his grimly deterministic view of life. I am thinking too of the entire anguished cast of characters in my first novel, Letting Go, written seven years before “Mr. Roth’s,” where virtually a choice about his life has to be made by some character or other on every page–and there are 630 pages. Then there are the central characters in the stories published along with Goodbye, Columbus, “Defender of the Faith,” “The Conversion of the Jews,” “Epstein,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” each of whom is seen making a conscious, deliberate, even willful choice beyond the boundary lines of his life, and just so as to give expression to what in his spirit will not be grimly determined, by others, or even by what he had himself taken to be his own nature.

It was no accident that led me to settle upon Daddy Will as the name for Lucy’s modest but morally scrupulous and gently tenacious grandfather; nor was it accidental (or necessarily admirable–that isn’t the point) that I came up with Liberty Center as the name for the town in which Lucy Nelson rejects every emancipating option in favor of a choice that only further subjugates her to her grievance and her rage. The issue of authority over one’s life is very much at the center of this novel, as it has been in my other fiction. Though it goes without saying that the names a novelist assigns to people and places are generally no more than decoration, and do practically nothing of a book’s real work, they at least signaled to me, during the writing, some broader implications to Lucy’s dilemma. That a passion for freedom–chiefly from the bondage of a heartbreaking past–plunges Lucy Nelson into a bondage more gruesome and ultimately insupportable is the pathetic and ugly irony on which the novel turns. I wonder if that might not also describe what befalls the protagonist of Portnoy’s Complaint. Now saying this may make me seem to you as “grimly deterministic” a writer as “Mr. Roth,” whereas I suggest that to imagine a story that revolves upon the ironies of the struggle for personal freedom, grim as they may be–ridiculous as they may also be–is to do something more interesting, more novelistic, than what you call “fortifying a position.”

As for “literary manner,” I have, as I indicated, a track record more extensive than your “Mr. Roth’s.” The longer works particularly have been dramatically different in the kinds of “strokes” by which the author “achieves his effects”–so that a categorical statement having to do with my position or view might not account in full for the varieties of fiction I’ve written.

I am not arguing that my fiction is superior to “Mr. Roth’s” work for this reason–only that they are works of an entirely different significance from those of such an ideological writer (whose book you describe as the “latest offensive in our escalating literary-political war upon society”). Obviously I am not looking to be acquitted, as a person, of having some sort of view of things, nor would I hold that my fiction aspires to be a slice of life and nothing more. I am saying only that, as with any novelist, the presentation and the “position” are inseparable, and I don’t think a reader would be doing me (or even himself) justice if, for tendentious or polemical purposes, he were to divide the one into two, as you do with “Mr. Roth.”

It seems to me that “Mr. Roth” might be “showy,” as you call it, for a reason. His use of the “broadest possible strokes to achieve his effects” might even suggest something more basic to a successful reading of the book than that he is, as you swiftly theorize, a “child of an indiscriminative mass society.” What sort of child? I wonder. And what multitudes of experience are encompassed within that dismissive phrase, “an indiscriminative mass society”? You almost seem there to be falling into a position as deterministic about literary invention as the one you believe “Mr. Roth” promulgates about human possibility. You describe the book as “farce with a thesis”: yet, when you summarize in a few sentences the philosophical and social theses of the novel (”Mr. Roth’s [book] blames society for the fate we suffer as human individuals and, legitimately or not, invokes Freud on the side of his own grimly deterministic view of life…”), not only is much of the book’s material pushed over the edge of a cliff to arrive at this conclusion, but there is no indication that the reader’s experience of a farce (if that is what you think it is) might work against the grain of the dreary meaning you assign the book–no indication that the farce might itself be the thesis, if not what you call the “pedagogic point.”

Accounting for the wide audience that “Mr. Roth’s” book has reached, you say that the “popular success of a work often depends as much on its latent as on its overt content.” And as often not–but even if I am not as thoroughgoing a Freudian in such matters as you appear to be, I do agree generally. A similar explanation has even greater bearing, as I see it, upon the authentic power of a literary work, if “latent content” is taken to apply to something more than what is simply not expressed in so many words. I am thinking again of the presentation of the content, the broad strokes, the air of showiness, the fiercely funny self-revelation, and all that such means might be assumed to communicate about the levels of despair, self-consciousness, skepticism, vigor, and high spirits at which a work has been conceived.

You state at one conclusive point in your review, “Perhaps the unconscious…is…more hidden from us than the author of Portnoy’s Complaint realizes.” May I suggest that perhaps “Mr. Roth’s” view of life is more hidden from certain readers in his wide audience than they imagine, more imbedded in parody, burlesque, slapstick, ridicule, insult, invective, lampoon, wisecrack, in nonsense, in levity, in play–in, that is, the methods and devices of Comedy, than their own view of life may enable them to realize.

Sincerely,

Philip Roth