The Lost Landscape (19 page)

Yet to my shame I did not tear out the offensive stitches and resew the hem; probably, as I often did in those days, I gave up the project in childish despair. For it was typical of me to become intensely involved with projects for a while—occasionally accruing praise in the effort—only to lose interest abruptly and abandon them. Yet I have always remembered the pious admonition—
But, Joyce, you will know it's there.

Once, 4-H chapters were everywhere in rural America, particularly in the West and Midwest. (For the record: western New York State is “Midwestern.”) The cloverleaf is the 4-H emblem; 4-H colors are white (for purity) and green (for growth). As I had eagerly memorized Bible verses in order to attend Bible camp at Olcott Beach, that had promised to be a great adventure, so too a scant year later I eagerly signed up for numerous 4-H projects in the hope of self-improvement and acquiring skills to make saleable items. My major agricultural project was to grow a special kind of jumbo-sized strawberry: though I set the plants carefully in rows, and was diligent about watering and weeding initially, soon I became bored and neglectful, and only with my mother's help on the eve of a county inspector's visit did “Joyce Oates” qualify for some sort of citation for having satisfactorily completed her 4-H project. (Did I win a blue
ribbon, ever? At least a red ribbon? Surely not at the New York State Fair at Albany, but possibly at the Niagara County Fair for one of my ingenious “crafts” or indeed for the jumbo-sized strawberries.) The most thrilling 4-H competition was square dancing, at which I must have been fairly capable, since eight of us (four boys, four girls) from our 4-H chapter were selected to dance on a local Buffalo television show—the most astonishing sort of celebrity for all of us teenaged farm boys and girls, if short-lived.

Only vaguely can I remember my farm-boy square-dancing partner, whose first name was Harvey. Or perhaps his last name was Harvey. In the television studio, we were so tense, so frightened, so reluctant even to breathe, our clutching hands were clammy-cold, yet sweaty. The great achievement of our several minutes of local fame on WBEN-TV was that not one of us fell down in the dance.

Many times I'd recited the 4-H pledge, with fellow 4-H'ers and alone, as a kind of secular prayer. Years later the calm unquestioning words float through my mind like petals on a slow stream:

(Reciting the pledge, the 4-H'er uses earnest hand gestures to indicate head, heart, hands, and health; the hand comes to rest on the heart, as in the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America. Though religious piety left me restless and uneasy there was something thrilling to me about these words, that promised so much yet did not seem to seriously commit the pledger to any course of action
and did not evoke any Savior toward whom one was obliged to feel gratitude or guilt. Indeed, it is surprising that the 4-H pledge conspicuously omits any reference to “God”—though in the early 1970s the closing line was expanded to include the words “and my world.”)

To recount the tireless energy of my early teenaged years is to feel again something of the fervor of an era when peddling things door-to-door was as common as trick-or-treating at Hallowe'en, and involved the same cast of characters. Though I could not have made much money, I was allowed to save everything that I made, and to have a bank account of my own in a Lockport bank; one of the great pleasures of my life was to contemplate the bankbook and to note the accretion of “interest”—in pennies.

As a slightly older teenager I took on babysitting jobs, like most girls my age; babysitting was more lucrative, less unreliable, than making and trying to sell things. But this career came to an abrupt end when, one evening at the home of a couple who lived about two miles away, on the Tonawanda Creek Road halfway to Rapids, I found myself terrorized for hours by a (drunken?) male relative of the family for whom I was babysitting, who appeared at doors and windows, knocking, teasing and tormenting, insisting that I let him in. I was too frightened to call home—too frightened to pick up the telephone since he could see me; I believed that he might break into the house if I did. And afterward I never dared tell anyone what had happened, for nothing actual had happened; I knew that reporting to my parents would initiate consequences in which I would be made yet more unhappy, and I could not bear being interrogated. But I never babysat again.

It suggests the desperation, and the quixotic nature of such desperation, that I applied for a job in a canning factory in Lockport—indeed, the canning factory in which Helen Judd's mother worked; I applied for a job in the Niagara County Tuberculosis Sanitarium,
a ghastly forbidding place on the outskirts of Lockport, set far back from the country highway that led to Olcott Beach. Neither of these applications, and others, resulted even in interviews, for I was too young, and had no experience. I did work—for a single day—at a food tent at the Swormville Volunteer Firemen's picnic, an exhausting and wholly unrewarding experience; other waitresses, my age and older, quit one by one during the interminable day until only a few of us remained, staggering on our feet. Yet my most humiliating experience was another single day as a “cleaning girl” for a woman who lived in a large house in Pendleton: here, under the instructions of the woman, I was obliged to dust, sweep, vacuum, scrub; clean and polish linoleum floors; wash some windows; polish silverware. It was not work for which I had any natural aptitude but I had thought I'd done fairly well and was surprised and hurt that I was never asked to work for the woman again. (Through a 4-H friend I inquired what was wrong and was told that the woman had said: “Joyce's attitude. She looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.”)

THE MOST CONTINUOUSLY DESPERATE
period of my life, financially speaking, was intermittent through my undergraduate years at Syracuse University. Here, I'd been awarded a New York State Regents scholarship, which enabled students whose parents could not afford the relatively high tuition of private universities to attend universities that, like Syracuse, matched the public scholarships. Still, there were myriad college expenses, not least room and board and books. My parents were very proud of my scholarship but must have felt the economic strain. Though I was the most conscientious of students, I lived in constant anxiety of doing poorly academically and losing my scholarship; any grade below an unambiguous A seemed to me a harbinger of loss to come, and utter defeat. (It
should be noted that I was hardly alone in such fears. Virtually every undergraduate whom I knew on a scholarship like mine felt the same way, and some of these, despite their anxieties, did in fact have to drop out.)

At Syracuse, I was grateful to work as a “page” in the university library for as many hours a week as I could manage—for one dollar an hour. This was my first authentic job; I could consider myself now an adult. Alone, stationed on one of the upper floors of the library (that seemed immense to me, for whom a “library” was the Lockport Public Library), as I pushed a cart to reshelf books like an enthralled Alice in Wonderland I could explore the stacks—rows upon rows of stacks—
English Literature, American Literature, Philosophy;
there was an open reading area with a long wooden table that was usually deserted and here I could sit and read with fascination what are called “learned journals” and “literary magazines”—an entire category of magazine utterly unknown to me before college. Discovering these journals was the equivalent of my discovery at age nine of the wonderful
Alice
books. For here was
Poetry
—(in which I read Hayden Carruth's harrowing autobiographical poem “The Asylum”)—
Epoch
(the first literary magazine in which a story of mine would appear, under the name “J. C. Oates,” in 1960)—
Journal of Metaphysics
(which I read avidly, or tried to read, as if “metaphysics” were as firm and respectable a discipline as physics)—
Modern Fiction Studies
(the first academic literary journal of my life). Equally intriguing were
Philological Quarterly, PMLA, Romanticism, American Literature, American Scholar
. A treasure trove of original fiction, poetry, essays and reviews—
Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, The Literary Review, Transatlantic Review, Quarterly Review of Literature
—the very “little maga
zines” in which, over the next several decades of my life, my own work would appear.

(My first published story in a national magazine wasn't in one of these, but in
Mademoiselle
, in 1959. Like Sylvia Plath in a previous year's competition I'd received an award from this chic fashion magazine in which, in those days, writing by such distinguished contributors as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Paul Bowles, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote routinely appeared. How improbable this seems to us, by contemporary standards! Yet high-quality fiction appeared in many glossy magazines of the era,
Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan
, intermittently even in
Saturday Evening Post
and
Playboy
, as well as in the more likely
Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire
, and
New Yorker
. It did feel to me, at the age of nineteen, that my life had been magically touched, if not profoundly altered, by the
Mademoiselle
citation.)

One of the great reading moments in my lifetime—if it isn't more accurately described as a life-altering moment—occurred in the second semester of my freshman year when I entered a classroom in the Hall of Languages, and idly opened a book that had been left behind—a philosophy anthology in which there was an excerpt from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. A sentence or two of this German philosopher of the nineteenth century, of whom I'd never heard, and immediately I felt excitement, and a kind of rapport; after class I ran to the campus bookstore where with reckless abandonment for one who had virtually no spending money I bought paperback copies of Nietzsche—
Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil
—which I have on my bookshelves, heavily annotated, to this day.

For here was one who argued as if “with a hammer”—the very weapon to counter those years of enforced passivity as a quasi-Christian conscripted into an adult world of piety in which nothing
was clearly explained, nothing was sincere, and all was obscured; my sense that, as a child, and as a young person, the elders of my world were conspiring to convince me of “beliefs” in which none of them believed, even as the pretense was
Ours is the way, the truth, the light. Only through our way shall you be saved.

To counter such smug pieties, the devastating voice of the philosopher—
What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.

AS A FRESHMAN I
lived not in a dormitory but in a less costly “cottage” on Walker Avenue with approximately twenty other scholarship girls, all of us from upstate New York. (We were “girls” and not “young women”—in age, experience, appearance. This was an era when “girls” were under a kind of protective custody at universities, subject to curfews which male undergraduates did not have. It is an accurate description of the “scholarship girls” of Walker Cottage that none of us minded in the slightest that we had to be back in our residence by 11:00
P.M
. weeknights—we had nowhere else we'd have preferred to be than in our rooms, studying.) My room was a single room, cell-like, sparely furnished, where I could work uninterrupted for long hours; for the first time in my life, I was free of the surveillance of my parents, however benevolent this surveillance might have been. And I could work in the university library, until curfew, at the long oak table that seemed magical to me, surrounded by shelves of “little magazines” I came to revere and even to love; I wrote by hand in a spiral notebook, sketches for fiction, outlines, impressions, which I then brought back to the residence to convert into typed pages. Stories, novels—even poetry, and plays—hundreds of pages of earnest undergraduate work which I would not have known to identify at the time as “apprentice work”—much of
it discarded, some of it reworked and refined into the stories which I would submit to the writing workshops I took at Syracuse and which would eventually appear in my first book, a story collection titled
By the North Gate
(1963).

If I open that book, composed and assembled so long ago, it's as if I am catapulted back into that era—I can shut my eyes and see again the oak table in the library, the displayed magazines on both sides; I can see again the room in which I lived at the time, the plain table-desk facing a utilitarian blank wall.

As the Lockport Public Library had been a sanctuary for me as a child and young girl, and a hallowed source of happiness, so the library at Syracuse University would be its equivalent, if not more, in my undergraduate years. Overall, Syracuse was a young writer's paradise: my professors Donald A. Dike, Walter Sutton, Arthur Hoffman among esteemed others were brilliant, sympathetic, and unfailingly supportive. (Disclosure: not once was I made to feel, by any of my professors, that as a young woman I was in any way “inferior” to my male classmates. However, it did not escape my awareness that there was but a single woman professor in the English Department and no women at all in Philosophy.)