Robert Root

 

"Writers, particularly novelists, are linked to place," Joyce Carol Oates has written. Home is "where you find yourself in your most haunting dreams. . . dreams most embedded in memory." For her, home is "upstate New York—the rural crossroads of Millersport, on the Tonawanda Creek, and the city of Lockport on the Erie Canal." I've long been aware of her links to my hometown.

 

Joyce Carol Oates and I were born four years apart in the same Lockport hospital. She attended early grades in a one-room schoolhouse near those rural crossroads and "between the ages of 11 and 15—through sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades," was a student first at John E. Pound Elementary School and then at North Park Junior High. John E. Pound was a short walk from my home. When she was in sixth grade, her classroom on the second floor, I was in second, my classroom on the first floor; we may have passed each other in the halls. Our junior highs were different—mine was Emmet Belknap—and she attended high school elsewhere. We never met.

 

Yet particulars of her Lockport life match mine so well I almost feel her presence in my hometown memories. She writes about the Lockport Public Library, "beside the dull red brick of the YMCA" (I swam there sometimes) and across the street from Lockport High School (replaced by a new building elsewhere when I was in junior high). She thought the library had "the look of a Greek temple . . . with elegantly ascending steps, a portico and four columns," set back past a gated wrought-iron fence and "very green jewel-like lawn." How often I crossed that lawn, climbed those steps, sometimes sat there with friends reading books we'd just checked out. I remember the spacious interior and the stairs to the basement children's section.

 

"What I most love about Lockport is its timelessness," she claims. She thinks the Erie Canal, "so deep-set in what appears to be solid rock, you can barely see it unless you come close, to lean over the railing of the wide bridge at the foot of Cottage Street," is what "resurfaces in dreams" of people who move away. She remembers the canal locks and boats passing through; recalls standing on the Big Bridge and feeling "a sensation of vertigo as you peer down at, or into, the canal 50 feet below." I crossed the Big Bridge alone on Wednesday afternoons for religious instruction at St. Patrick's, passing my father's Presbyterian church and a Ford gumball factory; with friends I clambered below it in search of pet baby alligators flushed into the canal.

 

She remembers being "a solitary individual mostly walking—walking and walking—along the streets of downtown, and along residential streets; over the wide windswept bridge above the canal at Cottage Street, and over the narrower bridge, at Pine Street; on paths above the towpath, winding through vacant overgrown lots in the vicinity of Niagara Street; and on the shaky pedestrian bridge that ran unnervingly close beside the railroad tracks crossing the canal." I too walked all those streets alone, crossed that footbridge with friends, and climbed onto the supports of the railroad bridge. One kid who jumped from there into the canal almost drowned. The footbridge shook when trains crossed above it.

 

Oates remembers "the dreary Lockport bus station, located near Lockport's largest employer, Harrison Radiator" where her "father worked as a tool and die designer for 40 years." My grandfather and his three sons also worked there. Perhaps one of them knew Fred Oates. My mother and I sometimes rode the Greyhound from that station to reach my eye doctor in Buffalo, crossing Tonawanda Creek and turning at Millersport. Watching movies before catching her bus home after school, Oates thought the Palace Theatre "a place of romance" because of "its baroque splendors—gilt-framed mirrors in the lobby, crimson and gold plush, chandeliers, Oriental carpets." She preferred it to "the less reputable Rialto," a grittier theater where I often enjoyed popcorn, two boxes of candy, a cartoon, a double feature, and a Saturday serials chapter. The Palace seemed too posh for me.

 

Oates' return to Lockport in 2009 to speak at the Palace Theatre likely occasioned those memories of her school years. Our youths in Western New York have a lot less in common if we step back from the article's focus and deeper into memoir. But often another's writing will not simply take me away into the landscape of her experience but simultaneously return me to the landscape of my own memory. As she says, "Writers . . . are linked to place" and sometimes, when readers are linked to the same place, it heightens the connection between them.

 

 

Note: More of Oates in Western New York

 

Oates, Joyce Carol. "American Gothic," The New Yorker, May 8, 1995: 35.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again," Smithsonian Magazine, March 2010.

Oates, Joyce Carol. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age. NY: Harper Collins, 2016.

 

Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years Trilogy follows one Iowa family for generations. I was reading Some Luck, the first novel, aloud at dinnertime when, in a chapter about Henry Langdon's life at the University of Iowa, I started this sentence: "The real benefit of the class, though, was that he met Professor McGalliard, and now, in the second semester, he was having a private tutorial in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever you wanted to call it." The next sentence mentioned Beowulf. I stopped reading and exclaimed, "What?! What!?" Sue turned questioningly and I declared, "I studied Beowulf with Professor McGalliard at Iowa twenty years after Henry did." Except, of course, Henry was fictional and Professor McGalliard and the Beowulf class and I were real.

 

Jane Smiley, younger than I, earned her MA and MFA at Iowa when I was completing PhD and post-doctoral studies. We wandered the same hallways, studied with some of the same professors, but never met. The real-life professor in her novel, John McGalliard, was taught me to read Beowulf in Old English.

 

In Some Luck Henry meets McGalliard in a literature survey course running from Chaucer to Oscar Wilde, and later studies Old English texts with him, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, "The Seafarer," and Beowulf. Smiley tells us, "After Christmas, he had brought that stolen copy of Beowulf back to Iowa City with him, and he kept it under his mattress." I studied those same titles at Iowa, several of them with McGalliard, and I suspect Jane Smiley did as well.

 

Professor McGalliard made a lasting impression on me. The mere mention of his name triggers lines from Beowulf: the very opening of the epic poem, "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum" ("Lo! We Speardanes in days of yore"); the statement "Beowulf mathelode bearn Ecgtheowes" ("Beowulf made a speech, the son of Edgethow"). I can still recite them with something close to the correct pronunciation, though I alter the orthography—the original text has different accents and letter combinations. McGalliard made his students read passages in Beowulf aloud, to get a sense not only of pronunciation but also of rhythm and meter. Those two alliterative lines (out of over 3000) have stayed with me for decades.

 

Late in our semester, McGalliard gathered his students in the Iowa Memorial Union to hear a discussion of ancient languages between our professor and a professor from Coe College, in nearby Cedar Rapids (whose wife was in our class). At one point the Coe professor read a long passage of Homer's Iliad in ancient Greek and then McGalliard read a long passage from Beowulf in Old English (or Anglo-Saxon or whatever you want to call it). We all recognized similarities in the nature of oral transmission and composition in ancient languages that we would have imagined had nothing in common. The occasion fostered an appreciation of the epic poem that our silent reading had not made apparent.

 

Around the time I took McGalliard's course, John Gardner published his novel Grendel, taking the perspective of the creature Beowulf kills in the epic. Gardner, it turned out, had been a student of McGalliard's. Ten years older than me, he was born in Batavia, New York, one county east of where I grew up, and earned both MA and PhD at the University of Iowa. Grendel, his third novel, was published in 1971. Someone in our class raised the topic of Gardner's book, and McGalliard spent a good part of that session inveighing against Gardner's interpretation. The discussion later made me read Grendel and, because it was about Batavia, I also read his novel The Sunlight Dialogues. I no longer recall what I thought of Gardner's fiction, but I confess that, since taking McGalliard's class, I've read at least four subsequent translations of Beowulf.

 

McGalliard was given passing reference in Smiley's Golden Age, the final volume of the trilogy. He retired about the time I finished my studies, a couple years before Jane Smiley ended hers. Gardner's Grendel was published almost two decades after he took McGalliard's class, Smiley's Some Luck roughly four decades later. Now I write this, almost five decades after Beowulf, Grendel, McGalliard and I met, just one passage in Smiley's novel merging my memories of graduate school with memories of her trilogy, John Gardner's novels, Batavia, western New York and eastern Iowa. All those things squirreled away somewhere in memory, somehow able to occasionally meet and mingle.

 

Notes: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999; Gardner, John. Grendel. Ballantine Books, 1971; Smiley, Jane. 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2005; Smiley, Jane. Some Luck. New York: Knopf, 2014.

 

I've mentioned before how scenes that surface in my reading, whatever my reading, sometimes trigger unexpected moments in memory, often rising from some deep catacomb in my mind. In the past, when I was more professorial—some blog entries may suggest academic tendencies—I would have tracked down literary or psychological references about it and quote other people's examples. But lately I'm less inclined to pontificate publicly about such theories and more internally prompted to learn how such moments happen to me.

 

Take, for example, how moments in Michele Morano's essay "All the Power This Charm Doth Owe" ignited moments in my own memory. I admired her earlier book, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, and I was moved and thoroughly engaged with Like Love, her most recent work. Throughout intimate, artful, and absorbing essays, she explores the complications and ambiguities of relationships. Readers living through them with her risk reviving complications and ambiguities in their own pasts. That could be a good thing—I recommend it; certainly, it set me to reviewing memories of my own that I haven't consulted for a very long time.

 

That particular essay startled me with references to Iowa City. Morano and I both graduated from the University of Iowa, many years apart. The experimental nonfiction courses I studied in eventually became her MFA program. As graduate assistants we both taught courses for undergraduates. She mentions teaching an "Introduction to Literature class that included Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream"; I taught Interpretation of Literature, as well as courses other GAs avoided: Drama (including a Shakespeare play), Medieval & Renaissance Literature, and Ancient & Biblical Literature (the course that eventually got me a college teaching job and a career).

 

In her essay, Morano refers to familiar locations. She recalls having "looked out on the English-Philosophy building where I taught and took classes, and on the massive library where I'd spent so many hours . . ." Reading that sentence I immediately visualize those buildings and navigating sidewalks between them, their entrances, staircases, hallways. I stop reading to tour memories of the EPB: the office I shared with another GA, classrooms I learned or taught in, offices where I met teachers and advisors. I remember searching shelves in the library, checking out or returning books, sitting at tables near windows with a view of the Iowa River, eventually earning a study carrel.

 

"The heart of Iowa City is a leafy, T-shaped pedestrian mall," she tells us, and recalls sitting on a bench there with a companion, "ice cream in hand, the music from a live salsa band down the block rocking our feet and shoulders. Small children marched past, followed by their parents, and the occasional grad student waved hello." What comes back to me is climbing up to the Old Capitol Building from the riverside, crossing to the university bookstore, circling the block to Prairie Lights Bookstore where so many literary readings were held, walking to a bar where some graduate poets and grad students worked, sitting alone at a movie theater matinee. Much more of the city winks from memory's shadows. I lived there six and a half years, through four years of teaching and a post-doctoral year. Being a grad student and hanging out on campus were things I was good at.

 

Michele Morano ponders aspects of love in her Iowa City life; I lived a different life from hers in my time there. My wife and I lived in a sprawling graduate student apartment complex where, in time, my son and my daughter were born, where my interactions with student families were social and energetic, especially when we gathered for volleyball, and possibly where that first marriage began to unravel. Morano's essay didn't remind me of any of that, some of which I've written about elsewhere, but it's only now, writing this, that I start thinking again about those aspects of my Iowa City life.

 

It's not that I'd forgotten them by any means but reading Morano's essay didn't immediately call them to mind. The reading turned on a light in a darkened room and reminded me of having been in it. I remembered the room and some more superficial aspects of it. To really remember living in it myself I would need to step fully out of that author's life and let the light further illuminate other spaces to reveal more of my life there to me. The illuminating happens the more I write about being there, the way writing tends to do. For now, I'll settle for recalling the spaces in Iowa City that, decades apart, Michele Morano and I both wandered through.

 

 

Notes: Morano, Michele. "All the Power This Charm Doth Owe," Like Love. Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books, 2020: 153-191. Michele's website:  www.michelemorano.com

 

We are living in a time of fundamental change, making it necessary to reassess who we are, what we value, why we make certain choices. What we are confronted with is disturbing, even alarming, its scale and scope extending to universal dimensions.

 

Days before I wrote this, the Perseverance Rover landed on Mars, sending images and sounds from a distant planet that alter our sense of our place in our solar system. Here on Earth a global pandemic had caused over two and a half million deaths worldwide, a fifth of them in our country. Politically, the democracy that once distinguished us had been at severe risk, and its restoration is still under challenge. Much of this century's entertainment focuses on the chaotic and the apocalyptic, abundant depictions of our civilizations, our cultures, our very existence facing willful degradation and potential extinction. The helplessness of the people of Texas confronted with freezing weather, inoperable power, and inaccessible water sources provides a concentrated image of where we are on a larger scale. The cumulative effect of all this has been to awaken awareness of our irrelevance to the universe.

 

But recognizing our irrelevance to the universe shouldn't encourage indifference to the lives we're actually living or the places we experience them. Many of us can't help sharing their thoughts about what they've realized. Any number of encouraging posts by people on Facebook emphasize how to recognize who we are and where we are and how to adjust positively to that knowledge. My friend Lisa Hadden recently posted a passage from Lyrical Zen titled "Ancestral Mathematics." It listed the number of ancestors, from 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and 8 great-grandparents on up to 2,048 ninth great-grandparents and, by the 12th generation, a total of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 years necessary for any of us to exist. To be alive today means that your lineage never terminated from the earliest homo sapiens in your genealogy until now.

 

I'm a grandfather; I'm aware that my lineage has extended beyond me. Once there was me, then I became one of two ancestors, and now I'm one of four ancestors my descendants can trace. Making it into the group of eight great-grandparents is remotely possible, but probably no further. By then, each younger generation of my lineage will have generated even younger generations, offspring I may never have knowledge of. That's the way life works. The great-grandparents I met as a toddler left only the slightest, foggiest impression on me; likely I made little on them. By the time I came along, I was only the newest of their great-grandchildren, and they saw me seldom before they left existence. In the course of daily living, we seldom consider how transitory existence is for everyone, even when we acknowledge those in generations before ours who are no longer with us or those friends and prominent strangers we were once familiar with who have now "departed"—have "passed," as funeral directors politely term it. My grandparents gone, my parents gone, recently my sister and my brother gone, one of my closest friends gone. Over the past 400 years more than four thousand ancestors gone.

 

That "Ancestral Mathematics" post, after enumerating generations past, asks readers, "Think for a moment – How many struggles? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness? How much happiness? How many love stories? How many expressions of hope for the future? – did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment?" The questions are not ones we can readily answer, although family records sometimes may hint at some of them, but we recognize the issues being raised. How much happiness? How much sadness? What and whom did they love and who loved them? What did they hope for and what hopes were realized? We can't always say but we certainly believe that these were what they experienced. How different could they have been from us?

 

The questions we might ask of our ancestors are ones it would be fair for our descendants to ask of us. They are questions we might ask of ourselves. What consolations did we find as we waited for the apocalypse? What happiness did we find in the world we lived in? What did we do to make a better world for those for whom we would be ancestors? What hopes did we try to fulfill and how well did we realize them? What struggles, battles, difficulties will we have left our descendants to face? When the time comes that none of our descendants will ever have been in the world when we were, what will we hope they might still carry on from us? How much more at peace with themselves do we hope they'll be?