Fresh Air Fiend (6 page)

"I'm not bothered," he said. "You can go anywhere, you can do anything, if you're not in a hurry."

That is one of the sanest statements I have ever heard in my life.

So many times over the years, in the most far-flung places, I have heard people exclaim, "This reminds me of home" or "This reminds me of"—and name a place where they have been very happy. It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

Friends are also reminders of where we have been, what we have seen. They are a repository of our past, and friendship and love enable us to retrieve memory. The most human emotions and activities put us in touch with the past, which is another way of saying that neurosis frequently distances us and makes the past ungraspable. When Freud says that only the unsatisfied person has fantasies, he is not saying that the more unhappy you are, the more access you have to memory. On the contrary, he states that if "fantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for the onset of neurosis or psychosis."

You know how much friendship matters to memory when, for whatever reason, a friend leaves the orbit of your existence. Losing a friend to death or absence or misunderstanding is not only a blow to self-esteem but a stun to memory. The sad reflection that we are losing a part of ourselves is true: part of our memory has departed with the lost friend.

One of the extremes of this is marital woe—separation and divorce. My wife and I separated in 1990. The pain of that event had many causes. It was an emotional trauma, but it was more—it was as though I had been lobotomized, part of my brain cut away. My wife had been a repository of our shared experience, and I could count on her to remind me of things I had forgotten. When she read something I had written, she had a unique ability to judge it. She always knew, even when I didn't, when I was repeating myself or being a bore. Her presence stimulated my memory, because her memory was an extension of my own. We had lived together and loved each other for more than twenty years.

It is easy for a writer to think, because of the solitary nature of the profession, that he or she is in this alone. But is that so? A writer cannot be the solitary figure in the Waste Land, the actor on the bare stage. "Everything I have written has come out of a deep loneliness," Henry James wrote. Lonely, yes, but he was not alone—he could not have been and written as he had of such a complex world, so many landscapes, so many levels of society. The paradox is that the writer is involved both in society and in the world, and yet is alienated from it. It is simply not possible to remove yourself from the society of people or the flow of events, yet the very things that stimulate writing are frequently obstacles to the writing process. Travel is a great stimulant, as I said, but it is hell to write while you are traveling.

I separated from my wife in London and quickly realized that I could not live in the city anymore. That very day I flew to the United States; I needed the comfort of my childhood home. I needed reassurance, the stimuli of those landscapes and sounds—the weather, the temperature, the odors. It was winter: frost, rattling branches, wood planks shrieking in the house, night skies, dead leaves.

I also needed the artifacts in that house, objects such as pictures and knickknacks. My chair. My desk. My books. With these, I felt, I could begin again. Once, about six years before, our London house was burglarized. People have various responses to news of a robbery. You feel violated, they say. The thieves must be desperate, they say. Criminals come from awful homes; they're on drugs; they need your stuff; you're lucky you weren't home; you might have been killed.

Mine was none of these. I felt, They stole my memories—they removed a portion of my mind! The insurance people asked how much my things were worth. I told them truthfully: they were priceless. I would never look upon those objects again and remember. For this reason, for a period of time I ranted like a fanatic. I am not talking about a video recorder or a radio. I am speaking of a small silver box that had the camphor-wood odor of Singapore, of the pen with the worn-down nib with which I wrote seven or eight books, of the amber necklace I bought with my last twenty dollars in Turkey. All of it gone, flogged to a fence somewhere in London. Sentimental value, people said. Yes, but to me there is no other value. If all we were talking about was money, then these things could have been replaced and I would have had no problem. What was removed from me by these thieves were the stimuli for some of my dearest memories.

Interestingly, Freud was just such a magpie in the way he collected little objects. His house and study were crammed with pots and statues and artifacts, most of them Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. He never wrote about them, but undoubtedly they stimulated him, for his work is full of classical allusions and historical detail. It's a pity that Freud's house was never burgled, because I would have loved to read his analysis of his own emotions as the victim of a theft of his treasured things.

I aspire, where material possessions are concerned, to the Buddhist condition of non-attachment. That is my ideal. I am not so acquisitive that I am possessed by these objects, though I do feel dependent on them at times. I think one must practice ridding oneself of them, but that requires concentration and great mental poise—I want to learn how to give them away; it must be my confident decision. I don't want them torn out of my hands. Obviously, the happiest person is that Buddhist who truly sees that such objects are illusion, and who owns nothing—all these possessions are in his or her memory.

The act of writing—artistic creation—dependent on memory, is itself a mnemonic device. And what is strangest of all is that drawing on memory—say, writing a novel—I am giving voice to one set of memories while creating a structure for remembering the circumstances of writing that book. Looking at almost anything I have written, I can remember the room, the weather, my frame of mind, the state of the world, or whatever, while I was working on that piece of writing. For a reader or critic this can be deceptive. For example, it was in Dorset, in the west of England, that I described the hot, cloudy tropics in
Saint Jack,
and in Charlottesville, Virginia, that I wrote about Dorset in
The Black House.
I look at
The Mosquito Coast
and see south London, and I glance at
Jungle Lovers
and hear the cooing voice of the Chinese amah feeding my children in our Singapore house.

My books mean as much to me for what they are, for their narrative, as for those personal scenes and circumstances that they have the power to evoke. Often, the memory of writing the book overshadows the work itself. This aspect of writing has not been explored or analyzed, and yet most novelists, when asked to introduce a particular work, reminisce at some point about the surroundings of their creation—the house, the family, the weather, the writing room. It is almost a conventional digression in any introduction. I can truthfully say that nearly everything I have written carries with it the circumstances of its creation.
Picture Palace
happened to be my twelfth work of fiction, but the title might have served for any of them.

Such books are in the widest sense histories—of my world and myself. In spite of my conscientious work, they are probably full of inaccuracies, but they are as true as I could make them. I lost patience with the Waste-Landers and the purveyors of whimsy, the people who used language for its own sake, its own sound. "It's like farting 'Annie Laurie' through a keyhole," as Gully Jimson says in
The Horse's Mouth.
"It's clever, but is it worth the trouble?" The opposite of play, Freud said, is not seriousness but reality.

The political implications of this ought to be obvious. Having lived through the fifties and sixties, and having heard all the canting conservatives, I am well aware of our national tendency toward revisionism. If the sixties was a time of disruption and unruliness by students and others, it was because they faced an almost overwhelming, and much more vocal, number of people who were saying, "Bomb Peking ... Bomb Hanoi ... Mine Haiphong Harbor ... Give white South Africa a chance." The Vietnam revisionists are legion, and the issue has been flogged to death. But to take a more recent example of revisionism, I was amused by the reception that Nelson Mandela was accorded when he was released after twenty-six years in a South African prison. I remember when he had received his life sentence—I had copied his courtroom speech in his own defense into my notebook. I remember reading this eloquent affirmation of human rights to a friend, who dismissed it, actually laughed, saying, "He's dreaming." Every industrialized country continued to trade with South Africa, and the apartheid regime officially declared the Japanese as white—and Japan gladly accepted the reclassification in its eagerness to trade. Mandela's reputation grew because a few people clearly remembered him, and because Mandela had the good luck to survive—he was one of those South African prisoners who were not tortured to death. Mandela's greatest achievement was that he himself was loyal to his memory. Hitler said, "Who remembers the Armenians?"—referring to their massacre by the Turks earlier in the century—when he was challenged in his decision to exterminate the Jews. It was only recently that Americans remembered who the Palestinians are, when we were forcefully reminded by the Intifada.

Memory can be a burden, and can seem a bore. In Sinclair Lewis's novel of the future,
It Can't Happen Here,
one of the hero's perorations about remembering sounds tedious to his listeners until America falls apart under a fascist dictatorship. Most Yankees who travel to the South are struck—I certainly have been—by the southerner's memory for details of a war the rest of us have mostly forgotten. Faulkner makes the point in
Absalom, Absalom!:
the southerner lives in a state of constant remembrance of the past. This is generally true, though the lamentation for the Old South does not always embrace the memory of slaveholding or the sort of apartheid, the Whites-Only signs, that I saw myself on a visit to Virginia when I was ten. The Civil War was fought in the South, but I also think that the humiliation of defeat is more memorable than the euphoria of victory, and emphatically, the winners have the most authority when they publish their version of history.

That is why it is often better to look at the past, or at the reality around us, through the window of fiction. A nation's literature is a truer repository of thought and experience, or reality and time, than the fickle and forgettable words of politicians. Anyone who wishes to be strong needs only to remember. Memory is power. I said earlier that in choosing to be a writer I felt that I was on the right road, but a narrow and lonely one. I remember most of the way, and now I see that it has been the long road home.

I
REMEMBER
the hot day by the lake, and the half-finished summer house, its rough-cut timbers still holding the tang of the saw blade, and the wooden floor, and my friend's barefoot mother standing in her shorts and bra. I was so small I saw her long legs rising into her loose shorts. Damp wisps of hair framed her face, which was bright with a blush in the day's heat, and she was playing Hawaiian music on a flat guitar. Never mind the music. I was almost asthmatic with lust.

"I haven't played this for such a long time," she said.

She was smiling. Her hands lowered to play the instrument left the cones of her bra exposed, and all her concentration was on her playing. She was a lovely woman and must have been in her early thirties, and although she had yellowy Latin skin, her eyes were pale blue.

My mouth was gummed shut in panic and pleasure. I was nine or ten. I had returned to the house for something and saw her. There were just the two of us in the house, and I sensed that I was part of something that was somewhat illicit—my very desire was a proof of it.

My friend had a habit of complaining about his mother. Each time he did, I thought,
You fool.

In the pistol imagery I associate with desire, I know the hammer was cocked on my libido that day. It was so sudden it left me breathless, and ever after, when I have run across that sequence of imagery, I have been helpless.

How can I speak for all men? But it seems to me that many men fix on their object of desire at a place that is deep in the recesses of childhood; their libidos are coded at an early age. It is the childish aspect of lust that is for most men the hardest to admit or come to terms with. It is the childishness that all prostitutes and role players know. Locate that imagery in a man's libido and he is yours. Being away from home, at my friend's summer house, was all part of the thrill. Being away is almost in itself a thrill—freedom, different rules, away from the strictness of parents. Is it any wonder I have spent forty years wandering?

That experience of the strange, the unusual, the forbidden, had been inspired by other sensual episodes at home.

Another woman, an unmarried college friend of my mother's, used to visit two or three times a year. She was attractive, Irish, pale skin, dark hair, and very kind and attentive. She talked to my mother, smoked and drank coffee, and then she left.

But not quite. Her cigarette butts, never more than three or four, remained in the ashtray, and smoke lingered in the air, pleasantly pungent and mingled with the odor of her perfume. All of this aroused me. No one smoked in my family; the perfume was distinct. And the keenest thrill of all was seeing lipstick on the cigarettes, not a solid color but the fine lines of her puckered lips imprinted in crimson on the paper, and sometimes on the rim of the coffee cup.

Lipstick, cigarette smoke, and perfume are all mingled in my mind as aphrodisiacs.

 

Like most men, I find myself staring at strange women, at the way they are dressed, and try to account for the fact that I am aroused. I grew up in the forties and fifties, and my experience of sexual subtlety and obliqueness was created by repression. Inevitably the woman who is the object of my desire is wearing a sort of slinky dress, with cleavage and high heels, an image of which Marilyn Monroe is the apotheosis: the fifties. That is the era when I began creatively noticing women. The key was cut all those years ago, and though it is a bit nicked and blunted now from constant use, it still unlocks my libido.