In Rough Country (31 page)

The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I seem to have become precociously independent. For not only did I take the Greyhound bus into Lockport but from the bus station I walked to school; while at John E. Pound Elementary, I even walked downtown at noon, to have lunch in a restaurant on Main Street, alone. (How strange this is—wasn't there a cafeteria in the school? Couldn't I have brought a lunch packed by my mother, as I'd brought lunches in a “lunch pail” to the one-room schoolhouse?) Though I rarely eat in any restaurant alone, as an adult, if I can avoid it, I loved these early restaurant excursions; there was a particular pleasure in looking at a menu, and ordering my own food. If any waitress thought it was peculiar that a girl so young was eating alone in a restaurant, it wasn't brought to my attention.

Later, in junior high, somehow it happened that I was allowed to see movies alone at the Palace Theater after school—
even double features. The Palace Theater was one of those ornate, elegantly decorated dream-palaces first built in the 1920s; there was also, across town, the less reputable Rialto where Saturday serials were shown to hordes of screaming children. Of the prominent landmarks of Lockport, the Palace Theater resides in my memory as a place of romance; yet romance fraught with some anxiety for often I had to run from the theater before the second feature had ended, leaving behind its baroque splendors—gilt-framed mirrors in the lobby, crimson and gold plush, chandeliers, “Oriental” carpets—to rush to the bus station a block or two away, to catch the 6:15
P.M
. bus marked
BUFFALO
. It's doubly strange to think that, in late fall and winter, it would have been dark as night at this time, and bitter cold.

In the shadowy opulence of the Palace, as in an unpredictably unfolding dream, I fell under the spell of movies, as I'd fallen under the spell of books a few years earlier. Hollywood films—“Technicolor”—coming attractions—posters in the lobby: here was enchantment! These movies of the 1950s starring Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe—inspired me to a cinematic sort of storytelling, driven by character and plot; as a writer I would strive in my prose to the fluency, suspense and heightened drama of film, its quick cuts and leaps in time. (No doubt, every writer of my generation—of all generations since the 1920s—has fallen under the spell of film, some more evidently than others.)

It was so, from time to time, solitary men “bothered”
me—came to sit near me, or tried to talk to me—quickly then I would move to another seat, hoping they wouldn't follow me. It was safest to sit near the rear of the movie-house since ushers were stationed there. Once, sitting near the front of the movie-house, I felt an odd sensation—my foot being touched lightly—held, or pinched—as in a ghost-grip—to my astonishment I realized that a solitary man who'd come to sit in front of me had reached down somehow through the back of his seat to grip my foot in his fingers; I gave a little scream, and at once the man leapt to his feet and fled to an exit at the side, disappearing within seconds. An usher hurried down to ask me what was wrong and I could barely stammer an explanation—“A man—he was sitting in front of me—took hold of my
foot
.”

“Your
foot
?” The usher, a boy of eighteen, or twenty, frowned in distaste at this prospect, as I did—my
foot
! In some old
shoe
!

As there was no comprehending anything so preposterous, so totally unnatural if not silly, the moment of crisis passed—the usher returned to his post at the rear, and I returned to watching the movie.

I don't think that I have ever incorporated this random incident into any work of fiction of mine—it hovers in my memory as bizarre, and singular, and very
Lockportian
.

 

It is not boasted in histories of Lockport and environs that, along with such renowned past residents as the late William Miller (Republican Barry Goldwater's vice-presidential running mate in the 1964 election, in which Democrat Lyndon Johnson was overwhelmingly elected), the late William
Morgan (inventor of volleyball) and more recently Michael Cuzzacrea (world record-holder for marathon running while flipping a pancake), the area's most “known” resident is Timothy McVeigh, our home-grown terrorist/mass-murderer. Like me, McVeigh grew up in the countryside beyond Lockport—in McVeigh's case the small village of Pendleton, where his family still resides; like me, for a while, McVeigh was bussed into Lockport public schools. Like me, he would have been identified as “from the country” and very likely, like me, he was made to feel, and may have exalted in feeling, marginal, invisible.

Unlike the downscale Rialto, the Palace Theater has been smartly renovated and refurbished, reborn as a theater that sometimes shows first-run films but more often is rented out to traveling productions, amateur local theater, and one-time events like this evening's. Before my presentation I am brought downstairs to the “green room”—a barren corridor of dressing rooms, a furnace room, closets—how unnerving this is, to find myself behind the scenes of the Palace Theater, the temple of dreams! And in this starkly lighted setting, so antithetical to romance, to be confronting my past—as in one of those dreams in which one's life flashes before one's eyes—Am I really here?
Here
—in the Palace Theater where long ago in the 1930s, before he'd started to work at Harrison's, my father Frederic Oates was a sign painter, making posters for coming attractions?

Onstage, I am greeted with tremendous applause. Perhaps I am perceived as one who has swum across a vast stretch of water, or climbed through an abyss.

Am I really here? Is this—possible?

Fifty years since I've left Lockport, more or less—and now for the first time I have been formally invited back to “speak”—I can't resist telling the audience that I hope this will become a custom, and that I will be invited back again in another fifty years.

He may have felt powerless, as a boy. He may have been watchful, a fantasist. He may have told himself
Wait! Your turn will come.

In a piece I wrote for
The New Yorker
for May 1995, on the phenomenon of McVeigh, so cruel, crude and pitiless a terrorist that he never expressed remorse or regret for the many lives he'd taken, even when he learned that his victims were primarily young children and not employees of the detested “federal government,” I observed that Lockport, well into the present, suggests a more innocent time imagined by Thornton Wilder or Edward Hopper, appropriated now by David Lynch: the slightly sinister, surreal yet disarmingly “normal”-seeming atmosphere of a quintessential American town trapped in a sort of spell or enchantment. That much remains unchanged over several decades—there is the Niagara Hotel on Transit Street, for instance, already seedy and disreputable in the 1950s when I had to pass by it on my way to and from school—is a consequence not of nostalgic urban planning but of economic recession. Harrison's Radiator Company has vanished, though its sprawling buildings remain, mostly vacant, renamed Harrison Center. As old churches scattered through the city have been renamed “centers”—“halls.” The derelict bus station has vanished, replaced by a parking lot; Lockport High has long since vanished, moved to the southeast, newer side of town;
the stately old Niagara County Bank has been reborn as a “community college.” But there the Lockport Public Library remains unchanged, at least from the street—the beautiful Greek temple-facade remains, and the jewel-like green lawn; to the rear, a multi-million-dollar addition has doubled, or trebled, its size. Here is unexpected change in Lockport—a good change.

And there remains the canal—dug by immigrant labor, Irishmen and Chinese who frequently died in the arduous effort, and were buried in the muddy banks of the canal—a waterway now placid, stately, a “tourist attraction” as it never was in its days of utility.

In America, history never dies—it's reborn as “tourism.”

 

Postcript:
October 16, 2009.
As a guest of the Lockport Public Library inaugurating a lecture series in honor of a legendary Lockport resident, beloved teacher John Koplas, I have returned to my hometown city—in fact, to the Palace Theater! Instead of the twenty to forty people I'd envisioned in the library, there is an audience of over eight hundred crowded into the now “historic” theater, even in the balcony; on the marquee where once such names as
Elizabeth Taylor
,
Clark Gable
,
Cary Grant
were emblazoned now there is
Joyce Carol Oates Oct. 16
above
Hell Rell Oct. 17
—a local rock band.

Scattered laughter, murmurings. Is “Joyce Carol Oates” being funny, or—ironic?

Gently ironic, in any case. For truly I am tremendously moved and my eyes are welling with tears and I am particularly
grateful that my brother Fred and my sister-in-law Nancy are here tonight in the audience—all that remain of my immediate family.

My presentation is informal, improvised, laced with “gentle ironies”—in fact, it's this very memoir of Lockport in an early handwritten draft. The audience seems appreciative as if they are all old friends—classmates of mine—as if I am one of them and not a visitor who will depart in the morning. More than once I'm tempted to shut my eyes and in a feat of verbal legerdemain recite the names of long-ago classmates—names as deeply imprinted in my brain as the street names of Lockport—a kind of valentine-poem, a sentimental homage to the past.

At the end of my talk, amid a wave of applause—warm, welcoming, buoyant—I am presented with a framed pen-and-ink drawing of the Lockport Public Library, by gracious Marie Bindeman who is the current director of the library.

How I wish that my mother, my father, and my grandmother Blanche Woodside were here with me tonight—that they were alive to share this extraordinary moment.
How proud we are of you, Joyce
—for pride is the life's-blood of family, recompense for hardship, endurance, loss.

Unexpected questions from the audience: “Do you think that there is a teleological purpose to the universe, and do you think that there is an afterlife?” Yet more unsettling: “Do you think that you would be the writer you are today if you'd had a middle-class or wealthy background?”

These questions, that seem to me not at all
Lockportian
,
stop me in my tracks. Especially the second. Beyond the blinding lights, eight hundred people are waiting for my reply. In the exigency of the moment it seems that they really want to know.

Without Millersport and Lockport—would there be “Joyce Carol Oates”?

THE WOMAN IN WHITE: EMILY DICKINSON AND FRIENDS

1. At age fifty, bereft of what might have been a comforting fantasy of marrying her epistolary friend Higginson, Dickinson seems to have turned to Otis Lord; it's likely that, though the judge's portrait, reprinted in
White Heat
, suggests the very antithesis of Byronic romance, it was Lord in whose arms Emily Dickinson was reputedly once seen “reclining” in the Homestead parlor by her scandalized neighbor/sister-in-law Susan Dickinson. Unmistakably it's to Judge Lord that Dickinson wrote girlishly flirtatious love-letters: “Emily ‘Jumbo'! Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter—Emily Jumbo Lord.”

THE ART OF VENGEANCE: ROALD DAHL

1. Among Roald Dahl's most popular children's books are
James and the Giant Peach
(1961),
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(1964),
The BFG
(“Big Friendly Giant”) (1982), and
Matilda
(1988); of particular interest to adult readers of Roald Dahl are
Boy: Tales of Childhood
(1984) and
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
(1977), which contains the autobiographical essay “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer.” In his memoirist pieces for young readers, Dahl speaks with an engaging directness and honesty that suggests that his most comfortable mode of writing was in fact for young readers whose natural curiosity, lack of cynicism, and inexperience he could assume:

Dahl's success as a writer of children's books far surpassed his success as a writer of prose fiction for adults and, according to Jeremy Treglown, “part of [Dahl] always resented that he had become best known as the author of what are known in American publishing as ‘juveniles.'” Dahl would be particularly chagrined to discover that on the Internet, “Roald Dahl” is celebrated almost exclusively as a children's writer; the official Roald Dahl website (www.roalddahl.com) is so very antic, it's a challenge for an adult even to peruse it.

2. In
Boy: Tales of Childhood
and in “Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer” Dahl writes in detail of having been the object of sadistic beatings at the Repton School. In “Lucky Break” Dahl recounts having been caned by the headmaster (“this giant of a man”) for the most trivial infractions of school rules: “That cruel cane ruled our lives.” In
Boy
, Dahl writes of having been caned by a school athlete/boazer whose very strokes in the flesh of a boy's buttocks were perversely admired. The sado-homoerotic undercurrent of Dahl's public school boyhood gives to these memories an aura of romantic nostalgia:

There is no male-female love scene in Roald Dahl's fiction for adults so exquisitely honed and so tender as this.

3. Roald Dahl's tales for children are affably narrated and are given a benign, not-very-distinctive comic-strip aura by the inoffensive illustrations by Quentin Blake, but demonic females figure prominently in such popular books as
Matilda
and
The Witches
, infusing the fantasy adventures with an air of sexual dread and revulsion. In
Matilda
, the young genius-heroine is persecuted by the demonic, deranged, and very ugly headmistress of her school, The Trunchbull:

(Canny Matilda defeats this monster through her superior mental powers, utterly.)

In
The Witches,
we are told:

“
LARGE AND STARTLING FIGURES”: THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

1. In “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O'Connor remarks bemusedly:

2. In 2008, the Modern Language Association catalogued 1,340 entries under “Flannery O'Connor,” including 195 doctoral dissertations and several book-length studies in addition to such meritorious earlier books as
Conversations with Flannery O'Connor
edited by Rosemary M. Magee (1987),
The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor
by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (1989),
Flannery O'Connor: A Life
by Jean W. Cash (2002),
Flannery O'Connor: A Biography
by Melissa Simpson (2005), and the closely argued and refreshingly unhagiographic
Flannery O'Connor's South
by Robert Coles (1993). Gooch notes—surprisingly, given the greater ambition, achievement, and international acclaim of the work of William Faulkner—that the 1988 Library of America edition of O'Connor's work “widely outsold” Faulkner's volume published three years earlier. (See O'Connor's misplaced dread of
the magisterial Faulkner in an essay of 1960: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our (Southern literary) midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” [“The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,”
Mystery and Manners.
]

3. O'Connor's favorite among her stories, “The Artificial Nigger,” has become virtually unteachable as a consequence of its blunt pseudo-racist title. Ironically, O'Connor had intended the “artificial nigger”—a crude black-face lawn ornament observed in a Southern town by the back-country Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson—to be a simulacrum of Jesus Christ and the story to evoke a tender sort of redemption unexpected in O'Connor's
oeuvre
:

4.
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

5. Poor Regina O'Connor! We have only fleeting glimpses in Gooch's biography of this pretentious “hide-bound Southern lady (who) always wore hat and gloves in public” and who seems to have been the model for a number of O'Connor's acid-etched portraits of garrulous, overbearing, and peevish Southern matrons, several of whom come to rudely abrupt, violent ends. In
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
, Elaine Showalter has provocatively suggested that Flannery O'Connor was “among the American writers of the fifties who confronted matrophobia, or the fear of becoming one's mother. Hating one's mother was the prefeminist enlightenment” of the era.

IN ROUGH COUNTRY I: CORMAC M
c
CARTHY

1. Typical of the sharply divided opinion on McCarthy's work is A. O. Scott's entry on McCarthy in
The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors
in which Scott says of
Blood Meridian
that it is
“by any criterion a masterpiece and one of the great American novels of the last quarter century” while the
Border Trilogy
is “sentimental, crowd-pleasing cowboy fiction” in which “some parts read like bad Hemingway, others read like bad Hemingway retranslated from the Spanish.”

2. See “Cormac Country” by Richard B. Woodward,
Vanity Fair
, August 2005.

ENCHANTED!
SALMAN RUSHDIE

1. The metafictional impulse to shatter narrative verisimilitude is boldly counter to the ambitions of “realism” and of the “historical novel”—to evoke distinctly credible worlds, carefully researched and replicated, in the hope of convincing the reader
This is not fiction but a window into the “real.”
The device can be very funny, if disorienting, as in the sudden revelation in
The Satanic Verses
that there is a “Supreme Being,” an author, inventing the trials of the hapless Gibreel Farishta:

2. In an interview in the
Spectator
, April 9, 2008, Rushdie said:

3. Rushdie's portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli as a sexually adventurous Florentine youth is substantiated by Maurizio Viroli's excellent biography
Niccolò's Smile
(1998), though of necessity Rushdie conflates and abbreviates the philosopher's political career and the range and depth of his writings.

A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIVES: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

1. Though the photographs of Susan Sontag
in extremis
will strike some observers, including this reviewer, as needlessly unsparing, taken at a time when the subject can scarcely have been aware of the photographer's presence, and could not have given permission to the photographer, it is clear from Annie Leibovitz's thoughtful commentary that she sees the inclusion of such photographs as enhancing, and not diminishing, her subject: “I edited this book with [Susan Sontag] in mind, as if she were standing behind me, saying what she would like to see in it.” Elsewhere, quoted in the
Newsweek
cover story, Leibovitz acknowledges: “I think that Susan would be really proud of these pictures—but she's dead. Now if she were alive, she would not want them published. It's really a difference. It's really strange.”

MARGARET ATWOOD'S TALES

1. See
Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood
, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (Ontario Review Press, 2006).

2. In
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(Anchor Books, 2002), Atwood remarks: