A Strong West Wind: A Memoir

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How do we become who we are? The question belongs not just to genes or geography or the idea of destiny, but to the entire backwash of culture and its magisterial march -- to Proust's madeleines and Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" and anyone's dreams of being someplace, anyplace, else. I was a girl whose father had taken such pride in her all her life, even when it was masked as rage, that he had lit a fire in me that would stay warm forever. I was the daughter of a woman who, on a farm in east Texas in the 1920s, had crept away from her five younger siblings so that she could sit on a hillside and read - a mother whose subterranean wish, long-unrevealed, was that I might become who she could not. Each of us has these cloisters where the old discarded dreams are stored, innocuous as toys in the attic. The real beauty of the question - how do we become who we are? - is that by the time we are old enough to ask it, to understand its infinite breadth, it is too late to do much about it. That is not the sorrow of hindsight, but its music: that is what grants us a bearable past. ***********P a r t I***********PROLOGUEFor a long time, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldn't claim it for the sadness it was. I missed the people and the land and the sky -- my God I missed the sky -- but most of all I missed the sense of placid mystery the place evoked, endemic there as heat is to thunder. You can be gone for years from Texas, I now believe, and still be felled by such memories: Some moment on a silent afternoon -- a cast of light, some gesture by a stranger -- can fill you with a longing that, by the laws of desire, will always remain unmet. And yet the truth was that I had been glad to go: that when I drove across the Tennessee River Bridge, I had wept with a kind of wild relief. The morning I left Austin was on a hot Friday in June, and my old Volvo overheated 80 miles north of town; my response was to pull the thermostat, throw four gallons of water in the backseat, and keep going. I drove through remote little East Texas towns named Daingerfield and New Boston, certain that such places divined what I was leaving and what I was going toward. The trunk of the car held an Oriental rug, a beat-up German typewriter, and a quart of Jack Daniels, and I racked up 500 miles a day pointed north by northeast, listening to Springsteen and Little Feat. At night, exhausted, I checked into cheap hotels along the highway, where I collapsed with a glass of bourbon and "Sophie's Choice," imagining that my new existence would be a female variation on Styron's Stingo - he was a Southern boy, after all; he knew a good tragedy when he saw it; and he had migrated all the way to Brooklyn to become a writer. Irritated by my mother's ordinary concerns, I called her, finally, from New Jersey to announce that I was safe, and that I had crossed four state lines in one day. Because she had spent most of her life landlocked in Amarillo, where you can see halfway to New Mexico without leaving Texas, she didn't believe me - surely even the miniscule states of the East took longer than that to get across. I made it to New York, then Cambridge, days after the Summer Solstice, that time of innocence and rue when the sun is poised toward diminishing returns but seems as though it will hold you in its light forever. It was 1981 and I was 30 years old, and while I scarcely knew it at the time, I had just finished -- or rather, launched -- an odyssey I'd been plotting my entire life. I grew up in the badlands of the Texas Panhandle, a place so vast and empty that its horizon is interrupted only by grain elevators, oil derricks, and church steeples. This is the Bible Belt, after all, where the daily grain-and-sorghum reports on the radio have to compete for attention with the church billboards along the farm-to-market roads, each of them offering a particular short-cut to heaven. The place was settled by Apaches and Comanches, and later, by preachers, ranchers, and farmers, with the men of God having the easiest lot: The only crops that do well on the Caprock, besides homegrown salvation, are wheat and grain sorghum. Given the Old Testament weather that defines the country, it's little wonder that religious faith became the cornerstone of the land and the people who stayed. I've seen hailstorms and tornadoes roll in over those fields with no more warning than God allowed Job, and a summer thunderstorm in Texas, which you can smell before it strikes, can be as humbling as it is ferocious. When a blizzard hits the Panhandle, which happens more often than you'd think, the greatest danger is to the cattle - there are no trees or rises of the land to break the wind, and so the cattle can breathe the snow, flying horizontally, and drown. People, too, have been brought to their knees for generations by this kind of weather: In the midst of so much nothingness and force, it's difficult not to feel beholden to some larger design.The skyline in northern Texas was made by the wind, which hammered the place into clay and caliche and near oblivion, then took what was left of the land and carried it farther west. These are truths you don't forget and can't amend; I know now that the angular wheat fields and blank vistas and eerie, lonesome sounds of the Panhandle shaped me as utterly as water informs rock. So mine is a story that begins with the fragments of dreams on the most desolate of prairies, where a child came of age listening to the keening of duststorms drown out the strains of Protestant hymns. No plagues or locusts here: just that residing, familiar emptiness, and the ensuing aches and consolations of the journey out. Is it too much, to feel that the wind carves you in this way? To this day I can hear its howling; I remember, too, being haunted by the stories of pioneer women driven mad by the wind - they simply lay down their brooms, according to legend, and walked out into the vortex, never to be seen again. As a child, I was afraid of the wind as well as the space that allowed for it. The opposite of claustrophobic, I placed my bed in a cramped corner of the room, as far as possible from doors and windows, then burrowed into territories of my own creation. Banned from reading at the dinner table, where I hid books in my lap, I huddled in the closet with a flashlight after bedtime, eschewing sleep for the intoxicating worlds of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or Nancy Drew or "Call of the Wild." The older I grew, the more elaborate these other realms became. A shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town, I lived a thrilling life between the pages of fiction; later, prisoner to adolescence, I wrote poems inspired by Ferlinghetti and saturated with melancholy. Year after year I stared at that bleak horizon and waited for rescue. Which, of course, had already arrived. The edifice of print where I continually lost and found my way was my Chartres pointed skyward.

Or maybe it was simply my true north. Now here I was, so many miles and years and pages later, having torched most of society's blueprints for a future. I'd walked out on the groves of academe just before they made me respectable, but I was also leaving behind a decade of idealism and excess - casualties of history whose troubles had convinced me not to be one of them. I had been half-wretched my last few years in Austin, hostage to the sort of dark confusion that only youth can manage. I lived in part of an old Southern mansion on the outskirts of downtown, a place with poured-glass windows and 11-foot ceilings, and I remember waking there on sundrenched Texas mornings, wondering how it was possible to feel so trapped in a place of so much beauty. I spent my days hurling myself through graduate school and my nights listening to Leonard Cohen's feloniously bleak "Songs of Love and Hate," or reading "Moby-Dick" in the steadfast company of Johnnie Walker. This, too, was a story I had read before, and I knew how it ended wasn't pretty, or even all that dramatic.But fear relented long enough to let me head toward some mirage I had envisioned miles beyond me. The day I drove out of Austin, the only keys I still possessed, besides to the old Volvo, were to a house I had lived in years before that no longer even existed. I took them off the key chain and threw them out the window somewhere near the Arkansas state line, and my breath caught as though life itself had just unfurled. Like a million cowards and trailblazers before me, I had mistaken being gone for being free.

I suppose I thought I was hitching a ride on the narrative that would save me: Surely you had to leave home to write, and to have something to write about, and surely you had to go East. Brazen with hope, I found an attic apartment in a working-class neighborhood, bought a futon and a ficus tree, littered the bare floors with apple crates full of books. Wearing the requisite leather jacket and sunglasses, I walked into Harvard Square, where a tourist stopped me to ask for directions. I took this as a fine sign: Now, I thought with coltish, exhilarated ignorance, Now I had bluffed and blustered my way into a wider world. And though it took me a long time to get over leaving Texas - though in some ways I will never get over leaving Texas - the fact is that my heart had clenched in recognition when I got to Quentin Compson's anguished protest at the end of "Absalom, Absalom!" Asked by his adversary why he hates the South, Compson responds with such unequivocal passion that he brands himself forever with his lie. "I dont hate it," he says, and says again, and then, "panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark," thinks to himself, "I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

*********** Unlike Faulkner's Quentin, who loved the promise of death even more than he loved his sister Caddy, there would be for me no bridge in Cambridge to mark my passage out of a brief and tragic life. But I was not the first of my family to leave the South, and the ones who had preceded me tended to meet with uncertain, even treacherous fates: aunts who died abroad under mysterious circumstances, uncles who turned their backs on Texas never to return. This legacy -- one of half-murmured stories and lonely displacement -- had insinuated itself into the family narrative with all the misty persistence of myth, so that the very notion of going far afield carried with it the stamp of courage and betrayal both. My father's oldest brother, Roy, had left the farm in Reilly Springs, Texas, in 1915; the first of 10 kids born to struggling farmers, he managed to make it to and through law school at Columbia. He married a Northfield Academy girl, started a practice in Manhattan, became an expert in maritime law. And yet these vast resources -- he was a genius, my parents used to say, a genius -- were not enough to protect him from alcoholism and despair, both of which were in the room when he turned on the gas in a Manhattan kitchen in the spring of 1941. My father, who was 26 at the time, went to New York to claim his brother's body. He waited half a century to tell me this story, and when he did, he ended it with a comment that seemed as incongruous as it was grave. "I saw that dark apartment," he told me, "and I saw the note Roy had left about the debts he still owed. And right then, I swore to myself that I would never be poor."That he believed poverty had claimed his adored brother, who had helped send him to college, was heartrending to me, but it also became more revealing over time. Poverty and war were the ruthless truths of my parents' generation; if you survived one, it was likely that the other was waiting in the wings. The rest of life's troubles - madness, booze, illness and premature death - well, these were simply the second-tier calamities that followed hunger and survival. The lives my parents had been born into and struggled to transcend were defined by economic and physical hardship - the bone-weary toil of rural America in the first half of the 20th century, when the goals were to finish high school, make it to the city a hundred miles away, find the white-collar job that promised headaches instead of backbreaking labor. Roy had cleared these hurdles easily and then, like Icarus, kept on going. My father proved his mettle and his loyalty to Roy by staying close to his widow for five decades, until her death at 88. Helen would marry again and leave New York, but the bond she had with her dead husband's favorite brother never wavered. It was my father's self-appointed duty to care for her in the wake of Roy's death; in their shared devotion, they kept the memory of Roy alive. Though he died a decade before I was born, I grew up with the presumption of his brilliance - and later, when I skidded on the black ice of adolescence, with shadowy warnings about where all that brain power had gotten him in his last years. Such sadnesses, for all the obvious reasons, usually blur over time into family secrets, and there is probably nothing more enticing to a child. I cared less about the sweet success stories of my parents' families than the terrible and fascinating ones: the uncle who was struck and killed by lightning in a field, the great-cousin whose tremulous eccentricities had landed her in a state mental hospital (my sister and I called it, with horror, "the insane asylum") down in Midland. Maybe not all children have such gloomy sensibilities as mine. But I suspect that, human consciousness being the cavern of infinity it is, we start off poised for the bad news as well as the good. Even the most innocent imaginations mature under the mantle of child-eating witches and ogres, antagonists that acquaint us with the concept of evil and allow us to bear such a world. For every woeful story I heard mentioned at family gatherings, I had a dozen more that were worse -- more shocking and lethal -- in the fairy tales and children's books I devoured. Circumstances could change without warning: The pet fawn you raised from infancy could die; you and your family could wind up shipwrecked on an island where a python might eat the donkey. I knew things were going to be tough, and I wanted to be ready.

This hardscrabble education had begun with beneficence and grace. My sister, my first young heroine, taught me to read when I was four. A smart tomboy who was two years the older, she often had to slow down for me; I had a weak leg from the polio I'd had as an infant, and so limped along behind her as best I could. Pam defended me from the less-than-dangerous bullies in the neighborhood - it was the 1950s, after all, and America had barely discovered backyard fences; instead, the clotheslines where housewives hung their sheets became the flag-like demarcations of children's valiantly defended territories. I know that after taking lip from an oafish girl who continually taunted her and threatened me, Pam (who must have been all of 5 at the time) finally hauled off and hit the child with a toy gun. My father, delegated to lecture his daughter about the high road of non-violence, took her aside and gave her a dime. Such was the world I grew up in: a safe place of renegade 5-year-olds and mammoth-protector fathers, where sisters accompanied you into the secret forests of literature and dads were there waiting, back in reality, when harsher measures were needed. If I could count on Pam to shield me on the streets of Amarillo, her real patience revealed itself during her first year of school, when she would walk home every afternoon and promptly teach me what she'd learned. Alone at home with my mother, I longed for my sister's return; I am told I would stand at the curb of our front yard and wait, a young sentinel, until I spotted her a block away. My memory of this outpost is hazy, though what remains clear is my arduous encounter, via her primary reader, with the word "the." I knew it was important -- it appeared with ominous regularity -- but the lack of a hard "t" confused me. Besides, it didn't do anything, this ubiquitous language joint; it had no anchor or tangible correlative. My sister persevered, as did I, until the word appeared in my mind as the link it was - a fencepost along the road of text, connecting the stories that seemed to go on as far as, even beyond, the North Texas plains.No place is a place, wrote the novelist Wallace Stegner, until it takes root in memory and legend. Otherwise, what you have is merely a mountain or a field -- Antietam, say, or Little Big Horn, with neither blood nor story spilled upon its soil. With the Panhandle beauty and anomie several decades behind me, my heart contends that the geography where we come of age is suffused with emotional coordinates; like Konrad Lorenz's famous goslings, we respond with primal longing to what we first perceive. My landscape of origin had a starkness so extreme that it could signal futility one day and possibility the next, but the evolving narrative that emerged throughout my childhood from those Texas wheatfields also had to do with grandfather farmers, with black-sheep uncles who dared to go North, with wayward, unmarried women. My Aunt Connie discovered me with her copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" when I was 11, then insisted to my aghast mother that I be allowed to plow ahead - an act of such subversive consequence that I will be forever grateful. Maybe brutish, tender gamekeepers loitered in my future; more important, maybe I could find the daring to practice my own brand of abandon.I must have realized, though, that such bravery or recklessness hardly guaranteed a happy ending. As I grew older, it began to dawn on me that the opposite held true: There lay Peyton Loftis at the opening of Styron's "Lie Down In Darkness," coming home to her broken father in a casket on a south-bound train. There was Wharton's gutsy Lily Bart, who had the nerve and enterprise to wile her way into society's loftier realms, only to lie sacrificed on the very cliffs she'd sought to scale. And there, finally, was Roy Houston Caldwell, a man whose story was writ so large that his photograph - a shot of him standing in a snowy field in Texas, his hands thrust in the pockets of his overcoat - still sits on my desk some 60 years after his death. The paths of literature and life alike were strewn with those who had dared to dream or dared to leave. From what I could tell, that kind of gumption promised passion, occasional treachery, and wild, horizontal leaps of adventure. If you weren't careful, it could also kill you.