Report from the Interior (18 page)

About two months after you started writing this book, you received a telephone call from your first wife, your ex-wife of the past thirty-four years, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis. As often happens to literary folk when they approach a certain age, she was preparing to have her papers transferred to a research library, one of those well-ordered archives where scholars can pore over manuscripts and take notes for the books they write about other people’s books. You too have unburdened yourself of vast mountains of paper by doing the same thing—happy to be rid of them, but at the same time happy to know that they are conscientiously cared for by the good people who run the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Lydia then told you that among the papers she was planning to include were all the letters you had written to her, and because the words in those letters belonged to you, even if the physical letters belonged to her, she was going to make copies and send them to you for a look, wanting to know if you felt anything in them was too private or embarrassing for public scrutiny. She would hold back any letter you asked her to, and if the prospect of exposing the ensemble gave you qualms, she could have them all sealed up for a specified number of years—ten, twenty, fifty years after you were both dead. Fair enough. You knew that you had written to her frequently when you were young, especially during a long, fourteen-month separation in 1967–68, when she was in London and you were in Paris and then in New York, but you had no idea how frequently, and when she told you there were about a hundred letters and that they ran to more than five hundred pages, you were astonished by the numbers, flabbergasted that you had devoted so much time and effort to those ancient, all-but-forgotten messages that had flown across seas and continents and were now sitting in a box in upstate New York. Manila envelopes started showing up in the mail, twenty or thirty pages at a time, letters that went all the way back to the summer of 1966, when you were just nineteen, and pushed onward for many years after that, even past the end of your marriage in the late seventies, and as you continued to work on this book, exploring the mental landscape of your boyhood, you were also visiting yourself as a young man, reading words you had written so long ago that you felt as if you were reading the words of a stranger, so distant was that person to you now, so alien, so unformed, with a sloppy, hasty handwriting that does not resemble how you write today, and as you slowly digested the material and put it in chronological order, you understood that this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn’t been able to write when you were eighteen, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood, a sharp, highly focused picture of a period that had largely blurred in your memory—and therefore precious to you, the only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past.

The early letters are the ones that interest you the most, the ones written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two (1966–69), for in the letters you wrote after your twenty-third birthday you sound older than you did the year before, still young, still unsure of yourself, but recognizable as a fledgling incarnation of the person you are now, and by the winter of the following year, that is, just after you had turned twenty-four, you are manifestly yourself, and both your handwriting and the locutions of your prose are nearly identical to what they are today. Forget twenty-three and twenty-four, then, and all the years that follow. It is the stranger who intrigues you, the floundering boy-man who writes letters from his mother’s apartment in Newark, from a six-dollar-a-day inn in rural Maine (meals included), from a two-dollar-a-day hotel in Paris (meals not included), from a small apartment on West 115th Street in Manhattan, and from his mother’s new house in the woods of Morris County—for you have lost contact with that person, and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognize him anymore.

Thousands of words addressed to the same person, the young woman who would eventually become your first wife. You met in the spring of 1966, when she was a freshman at Barnard and you were a freshman at Columbia—products of two radically different worlds. A dark-haired Jewish boy from New Jersey with a public school education and a fair-haired WASP from Northampton, Massachusetts, who had moved to New York at ten or eleven and had been given scholarships to the best private schools—several years at all-girl Brearley in Manhattan, then off to Putney in Vermont for high school. Your father was a scrambling, self-employed businessman with no college education, and her father was a college professor, an esteemed critic who had taught English at Harvard and Smith and was now a member of the Columbia faculty. In no time at all, you were bowled over. She, though not bowled over, was nevertheless curious. What you shared: a passion for books and classical music, a determination to become writers, enthusiasm for the Marx Brothers and other forms of comic mayhem, a love of games (from chess to Ping-Pong to tennis), and alienation from American life—in particular, the Vietnam War. What drove you apart: an imbalance in the chemistry of your affections, fluctuations of desire, unstable resolve. For the most part you were the pursuer, and she alternated between resisting your advances and wanting to be caught, a state of affairs that led to much turmoil in the years between 1966 and 1969, numerous breakups and reconciliations, a constant push and pull that generated both happiness and misery for the two of you. Needless to say, each time you wrote to her you were apart, physically separated for one reason or another, and in letter after letter you devote much space to analyzing the difficulties between the two of you, or suggesting ways to improve them, or trying to work out arrangements for seeing her again, or telling her how much you love her and miss her. By and large, the letters can be considered love letters, but the ups and downs of that love are not what concern you now, and you have no intention of turning these pages into a rehash of the romantic dramas you lived through forty-five years ago, for many other things are discussed in the letters as well, and it is those other things that belong to the project you have been engaged in for the past several months. They are what you will be extracting from the time capsule that has fallen into your hands—what will allow you to go on with the next chapter of this
report from the interior.

S
UMMER
1966.
Your first year at Columbia was behind you now. That was the school you had wanted to go to, not only because it was an excellent college with a strong English department, but because it was in New York, the center of the world for you back then, still the center of the world for you, and the prospect of spending four years in the city was far more appealing to you than being confined to some remote campus, stuck in some rural backwater with nothing to do but study and drink beer. Columbia is a large university, but the undergraduate college is small, just twenty-eight hundred students back then, seven hundred boys per class, and one of the advantages of the Columbia program was that all the courses were taught by professors (full, associate, or assistant) rather than by graduate students or adjuncts, which is the case with most other colleges. Your first English teacher, therefore, was Angus Fletcher, the brilliant young disciple of Northrop Frye, and your first French teacher was Donald Frame, the renowned translator and biographer of Montaigne. By chance, Fletcher taught two of your classes in the fall, Freshman Humanities (a great books course that all students were required to take) and a course devoted to the reading of a single book—which turned out to be
Tristram Shandy.
Freshman Humanities was without question the most invigorating intellectual challenge of your life so far, a high-dive plunge into a universe of marvels, revelations, and all-encompassing joy—joy you still feel whenever you return to the books you read that year. The first term began with Homer and ended with Virgil, in between there was Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and in the second term you went from Saint Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and Cervantes all the way to Dostoyevsky. The class was small, everyone chain-smoked and flicked the ashes on the floor, the discussions led by Fletcher were both spirited and provocative, and your life was never the same again. Admittedly, there were aspects of the college experience that were less inspiring to you, dreary patches of forlorn brooding, the ugliness of the dormitory, the institutional coldness of the Columbia administration, but you were in New York, and therefore you could escape whenever you were not sitting in class. One of your boyhood friends started Columbia that year as well, and because all out-of-town freshmen were required to live in dormitories, the two of you shared a room on the eighth floor of Carman Hall. Your friend came from a wealthy family, and rather than attend the local public high school as you had, he’d been sent to a progressive boarding school in Vermont, the same Putney School that Lydia had graduated from. That was how you met her—through your roommate. Through Lydia, you met another Putney graduate, Bob P., who was a freshman at a college in upstate New York, but he came down to the city often enough that spring for the two of you to become friends. A fellow future poet, Bob was an eighteen-year-old boy of great intelligence and sharp, effusive wit, and after the academic year ended, you decided to join forces for the summer, traveling up to the Catskills to work as groundskeepers at the Commodore Hotel (a strange adventure, recounted at some length in
Hand to Mouth
), and after you quit that job because the pay was too low and they didn’t feed you enough, you went to Bob’s hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where for the next month or six weeks you lived in his parents’ well-appointed Tudor house and worked in the warehouse of his father’s appliance business. Better pay and better food, and the job was not difficult, for you were exceedingly strong at nineteen and the task of moving around large, heavy boxes was old hat to you by then, since for part of the summer two years earlier you had worked at your aunt and uncle’s appliance store in Westfield, New Jersey (a smaller but similar enterprise, also discussed in
Hand to Mouth
), and now you were at it again, eight hours a day in a cinder-block building with a cement floor, and all through those hours a radio would be rumbling in the background, filling the dead air of that space with the popular hits of 1966, none more popular than “Strangers in the Night,” as sung by Frank Sinatra, which must have come on a thousand times during the weeks you spent there, a song you heard so often and came to dislike so much that even now, at sixty-five, you have only to hear two bars of that wretched ballad to be thrust back into the summer heat of Youngstown, Ohio. Sometime in early August, you and Bob were given a ride back east, and after a brief stop at your mother’s apartment in Newark, you took off again, this time in the white Chevy you had owned since your junior year of high school, heading north for the woods of Vermont and the beaches of Cape Cod. You can’t remember why you wanted to go to those places, but you enjoyed driving back then, you took pleasure in long car journeys, and perhaps you went simply for the sake of going. On the other hand, you have a dim recollection that Lydia had gone to Cape Cod with her parents, to a house somewhere in Wellfleet, and that you and Bob wanted to show up at her door unannounced and say hello. The moronic gallantry of teenage boys. If you were looking for her, it is certain that you never found her, and after a night spent sleeping outdoors on the beach, you moved on. The first extant letter from the time capsule was written in your mother’s Newark apartment on August fifteenth, just after your return. It begins as follows: “Yes, we have come back. No, it was not much fun. Did we see the ocean? Yes. Did we see Cape Cod? Yes—to the very tip. Did we see Boston? Yes. Twice. Did we see Putney? Yes. The Alumni House? Yes, filled with African students. And the trip, was it restful? No. Did we drive very far? Yes. Over 1000 miles. Are we tired? Yes. Very. Have we been in Newark long? No, several hours. Are we now occupied? Yes. Bob in the shower. Paul on the couch, writing a letter to Lydia. To what end the trip? A woeful tale of misbegotten adventure. Was it educational? Perhaps. Did we pass Wellfleet? Yes. And what did Paul think? Of how much he loved Lydia. In thinking about her, was he objective? Only as far as love allows one to be objective. The nature of his thoughts? Wistful. Infinite sadness. Infinite longing.”

A week later (August 22), still in your mother’s Newark apartment, with Bob P. surely gone now, a rambling letter of six pages that begins oddly, pretentiously, with a number of chopped-up sentences: “Here. I am here. Sitting. Begin I will, but slowly, for I feel myself telling myself that I shall go on for a while, perhaps too long a while … You shall hear, here, before I say what I have sat to say, bits and scraps, odds and ends, what one calls news, or chatter, but what I call, perhaps you too … ‘warming up,’ which is, I assure you, merely a figure of speech, for certainly I am already quite warm (it’s summer, you know).” After some morbid remarks about the horror and inevitability of death, you suddenly shift course and declare your intention to speak only of cheerful things. “As I walked down Putney Mountain not too long ago, having climbed atop the tip, it suddenly came to me, so to speak in a flash, that is, I became cognizant of the one truly comic thing in the world. That is not to say that many things are not comic. But they are not purely comic, for they all have their tragic side. But this is always comic, neverfail. It is the fart. Laugh if you will, but that only reinforces my argument. Yes, it is always funny, can never be taken seriously. The most delightful of all man’s foibles.” Then, after another sudden shift “(I paused to light a cigarette—thus the hiatus in my ever even path of thought),” you announce that you have recently bought a copy of
Finnegans Wake.
“Thinking that I would probably never read it, I picked it up and began to read. I have had trouble putting it down. Not that it is easily understandable, but it is true fun. You have read some of it, haven’t you? Much there.” A few sentences later: “I have a great deal of work to do on the play. Having just started writing again yesterday, after not looking at it for 2 weeks, it tells me that I have much to do.” The manuscript of that early effort has been lost, but the statement is proof that you were earnestly writing back then, that you already thought of yourself as a writer (or future writer). Then, no doubt in answer to a question asked by Lydia in a letter responding to your previous letter: “North Truro is the beach we went to. We arrived at six o’clock—the time. I especially liked the shadows in the footprints.” A bit further on, you are offering advice, commenting on something she must have said in her letter: “… to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia—but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of ‘inspiration’ next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.” Finally, as you approach the last page of the letter, you tell her that you are expressing yourself badly. “So difficult. You see, I am infinitely confused about the whole business of life. All turned upside-down, shaken, shattered. I know it will always be so—the confusion. And how I hated myself for telling you about the goodness of life … when you called me here the night you were ill. What’s the point? Why live? I don’t want to muck about. In the end, I believe, more strongly than I believe in anything else, that the only thing that matters at all is love. Ah, the old clichés … But that is what I believe. Believe. Yes. I. Believe. Lost if without it. Life a miserably bad joke if without it.”