‘The Lost Landscape,’ by Joyce Carol Oates
“Ringed by forbidden territories she nevertheless set out to explore.” Credit Corbis
Joyce Carol Oates is an ambivalent memoirist.
In “The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age,” she repeatedly expresses
her doubts about first-person autobiographical writing. For one thing, she’s
deeply wary of the confessional voice. For another, she has little faith in the
reliability of memory. While she can vouch for the accuracy of “A Widow’s
Story,” her 2011 account of the aftermath of her first husband’s death, which
she based on contemporaneous journals, she can hardly back up this latest
memoir with documentation. No small child, not even a Joyce Carol Oates, could
be expected to take notes all day. Yet another problem: The memoirist is obliged
to leave things out. “To charges of distortion,” she writes, “I can only say — mea
culpa.”
This apology is tongue-in-cheek — Oates is not
so much admitting fault as complaining that memoir is a compromised and
compromising genre — but her tone grows more serious when she speaks of
memoiristic betrayals. “Nothing,” she writes, “is more offensive than an adult
child exposing his or her elderly parents to the appalled fascination of
strangers.” This is a little high-minded for most memoirists, but Oates shows
her true alienation from the genre when she observes that “not individuals but
rather events and occasions — prevailing ‘themes’ — are what engage me most as
a writer, for nothing merely particular and private can be of more than passing
interest.” Here is a true fiction writer’s credo. For the memoirist, nearly the
opposite is true. Especially in a memoir of childhood, the mission is to
preserve the private and the particular, to make the transitory eternal.
In spite of these anti-memoiristic rumblings, “The
Lost Landscape” remains indisputably a memoir. Like many these days, it’s not
continuous, and is composed almost entirely of previously published essays. In
this case, some reach back to the 1990s and even the 1980s. The greater part of
the book is arranged chronologically. Small, tightly focused pieces alternate
with substantial narratives to make a satisfying whole, giving the reader a
coherent account of Oates’s childhood and adolescence. The last quarter is a
pastiche of pieces and fragments without a through-line.
For all of Oates’s doubts about the primacy of
the particular and the private, “The Lost Landscape” is full of specifically
memoiristic pleasures. She offers pungent details about the small New York
State farm where she was raised: Roosters chase away barn cats, hens attack one
another, Bartlett pears begin to soften and bruise the moment they ripen. Her
characterizations of her parents are blurred by filial reverence, but she gives
the reader a good hard look at her Hungarian grandparents. A short piece called
“The Brush” neatly captures Oates’s rough, dirty, handsome, teasing
grandfather, who loved her and whom she dreaded.
Hers was truly a writer’s childhood, safe and
happy at the center but ringed by forbidden territories she nevertheless set
out to explore, sometimes physically and sometimes in imagination. In “Happy
Chicken 1942-1944,” which is narrated by Oates’s favorite Rhode Island Red (an
arch conceit, but it works), Oates is shown as a little girl, carting around
this adored fowl, so much brighter and more alert than the other hens. Oates in
turn was prized by her parents, who kept things from her. One day the favored
chicken was gone, we all know where. Oates searched for her in vain.
The imperative to investigate what her parents
concealed became, eventually, the impetus for Oates’s writing. This is the
theme of the essay “They All Just Went Away,” which begins with a spectacular,
sustained evocation of the dangerous joy of trespassing. In her childhood
wanderings, Oates was repeatedly drawn to explore the burnt-out house in the
woods where the Judd family (an invented name) had once lived squalidly, where
the children — Oates knew them — were beaten and sexually abused by their
drunken father. One night, in a rage, he set fire to the place. Oates watched
the conflagration from a window in her own safe, well-kept house. (“Like all
great events of long ago,” she writes, “it was an adult occasion.”) After this,
the father went to jail and the family scattered. The older daughter, Helen,
with whom Oates had once shared a wary, intermittent friendship, eventually
turned up in the special-ed classroom at Oates’s junior high school. Oates
tried to reach out to her, but was gently rebuffed. By now, shame had taught
Helen Judd to accept her place as an outcast.
Perhaps because she prefers to deflect the
narrative spotlight rather than occupy it, doppelgängers begin to show up in
Oates’s accounts of adolescence. The first of these appears in “An Unsolved
Mystery: The Lost Friend.” This is Cynthia Heike (another alias), a high
school friend. Like Oates, she was bright, ambitious and driven, but, unlike
Oates, deeply troubled. Undermined by a critical father, she committed suicide
at 18. The rapport and rivalry between these two promising girls is marvelously
dramatized, as is Oates’s persistent guilt at having survived her.
Another mirror-self appears in “The Lost
Sister: An Elegy.” Lynn Ann Oates was born on Joyce Carol’s 18th birthday, a
replica of her older sister physically, but profoundly autistic. Oates’s
parents, who have been happily devoted to their gifted older daughter, are
sadly devoted to this tragically defective younger one. Her care devours their
lives. But Lynn Ann is not only mute and unreachable, she also reveals a
tendency to violence, and eventually must be institutionalized. In an
excruciating irony, she destroys the books her sister brings home on a visit,
leaving tooth marks on what remains of a treasured edition of “The Golden
Bowl,” with an “all but impenetrable introduction by R.P. Blackmur.”
In “Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time,”
Oates goes on to tell the story of her years as a graduate student at the
University of Wisconsin, where loneliness and academic pressure so overwhelmed
her that she developed insomnia and tachycardia. Ultimately, an unsympathetic
(male) professor sabotaged her oral exams. As a result, she was awarded a
terminal M.A., the worst possible affront to a graduate student. But it could
have been worse; the doppelgänger in this piece is Oates’s beloved friend
Marianna Mason Churchland (an alias), who broke down completely and withdrew
from the program.
Even as Oates suffered under the weight of the
graduate curriculum, she found happiness in her engagement and marriage to
Raymond Smith. But, oddly enough, no sooner does Oates introduce him to the
reader than she abruptly pulls down the narrative curtain. “I am sorry,” she
writes, “but I am not able to write about Ray here.” “Oh,” thinks the startled
reader, who had been following along sympathetically, “I hadn’t meant to pry.”
But another thought immediately follows: Why,
the reader wonders, is Oates telling us what she isn’t going to tell us? Why
doesn’t she just — not tell us? The memoirist, after all, is free to work
around material she finds too painful to discuss, to set the boundaries of her
narrative wherever she chooses. But, all along, Oates has rejected the terms of
the memoir. Now, having nearly completed the chronologically connected body of
the book, she seems to turn away from the reader as well. It’s an odd,
alienating way to leave things. The hodgepodge of biographical scraps she
offers in the last two brief sections — a loosely woven reminiscence about her
father, a list of favorite foods from the 1950s, journal entries, philosophical
ruminations, a poem in tribute to her mother, an excerpt from a phone call with
her father — does little to make up for the reader’s disappointment.
THE LOST LANDSCAPE
A Writer’s Coming of Age
By Joyce Carol Oates
Illustrated. 353 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins
Publishers. $27.99.
Emily Fox Gordon is the author of “Book
of Days: Personal Essays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/books/review/the-lost-landscape-by-joyce-carol-oates.html
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