NOTES FOR A LIFE NOT MYOWN

if it involves family or sex. If both, extra good!A poem by the Australian poet Laurie Duggan:

If it looks too much like poetry nowit may look less like poetry in the future.Hence Logan Pearsall Smith's line:You can't be fashionable and first-rate.

Perhaps what it boils down to in the end ishowserious one is willing to be about it.By serious-ness, I do not mean solemnity or weighty poetics.Rather, I am speaking of how much attention andenergy the poet is willing to bring to the mate-rial and emotion that drive the poem, and howpatient he or she is willing to be in allowing thepoetic impulse to disclose its nature while at thesame time resisting habituated patterns of styleand resolution. I further mean by seriousnesssomething that approaches character: the will notto appropriate only those aspects of experiencethat suit a preconceived mold; finally, to devel-op and sustain individuality without backslid-ing into novelty and shtick.

I am speaking here of honest writing, of en-gaging the matter at hand in all of its nuance andcomplexity, or all of its plainness, and not bail-ing out until the last possible instant.

[Memoir]

NOTES FOR A LIFENOT MY OWN

By Verlyn Klinkenborg. From Fathers and Sons, acoUectionof essays edited Iry David Seybold, publishedthis month Iry Grove Weidenfeld. Klinkenborg, whosemost recent work is The Last Fine Time, wrote"Back to Love Canal" in the March 1991 issue ofHarper's Magazine.

In recent years I have written several essaysinwhich my father played a part. They were allusive,as essaystend to be, and each one seemed to catchthe feeling I was after at the time I wrote it. Buteven goodwork begins to drift away the momentit is done. Sooner or later every writer reachesthe point where his words feel like a shroud. Hebegins to wishhe could brush them awayand stepinto the present, into the open, as himself. But towrite is to commit words to the past, to build withbricks that finally conceal the writer, though thewall remains for anyone to see.

•My father, at sixty-five, is still a young man in

most ways. He and I use a language we haveworked out for ourselves, a scientific language illwhich each word stands for one object. Whenwe say "Montana" or "transmission fluid," we

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MAY 1992

know what we're talking about. This tongueevolved in a disputatious time. My mother wasour interpreter, and when she died we were leftspeechless. In the silent period that followed, Ithink we saw in my mother's death how muchwe stood to lose in each other. We have nottalked about it. We have no words in our lan-guage appropriate to such feelings, though weknow a thousand names for "trout lure." Butthis is true and I say it for myself: Death makesindividuals of us all. The individual it made forme was my father.

•My father tells a story about a day in his child-

hood when he and his own father were makinghay for neighbors in the northwest comer ofIowa. The terrain there is more exposed thanthe fields in Iowa's midlands. My father and hisdad went home for the noon meal, and a stormblew up. When they returned to the hayfield,they found one man dead ftom a lightning strikeand three men unconscious. They thought thefour were sleeping. This is how the gods gavefarmers silence.

•My father tells another story. He and a friend

had gone after whitefish in the high lakes ofColorado. The time was just before iceover, whenthe water turns black with cold. They were har-vesting winter fish for the freezer,catching themwith grubs on gold-plated hooks. As they fished,they huddled round a fire built onshore. A cow-boy rode up on his horse. He dismounted, tooka fishing rod from his gear, removed his boots, andwet-waded thigh-deep into the lake. He caughta short stringer of fish, waded back to shore, puton his boots, and rode away.This was one of thegods who gave farmers silence.

•When my father cooks, he is likely to make

one of three things: oyster stew, which he savesfor Christmas Eve; chicken dumpling soup, whichis a Saturday noon dish; or venison chili, whichis made from last year's venison burger and car-ried frozen into camp. The recipe for venisonchili he learned in elk camp from an old man whoonce cooked for Teddy Roosevelt. The trick iswhole cloves.

•My father tells a harvest story from his child-

hood in the northwest comer of Iowa. He al-ways carried a .410 shotgun on the tractor.When a pheasant fluttered up from the stalksahead, he would raise the gun to his hip andfire, one hand still on the steering wheel. Heis as good a shot from the hip as from the shoul-der. I have never seen it proved, but I know bet-ter than to doubt it. That is not the kind ofthing he exaggerates. My first shotgun was a lit-tle .410 with an old-fashioned hammer. What

was missing was the tractor and the cornfieldand the birds and the solitude. We moved toCalifornia in the mid-Sixties for my mother'shealth, but also because in Iowa the huntinghad disappeared.

•One night in Tahoe, a famous television actress

invited a stranger from the audience to join heract. That was my dad. He cut the rug, sang har-mony, danced with his arm around her waist.This is a scene a writer would like to embellish,but not a son. (The crackle of her clothing, thenimbus of perfume, the sex that seemed so per-sonal from afar but was seen onstage to be a kindof ventriloquism.) When my father lefr the farm,he was led awayby music. He played the baritonehorn, the piano, and sang. Later, he directed.Sundays I would see him, his back to the con-gregation, leading the choir with quick move-ments, the loose sleeves of the robe slippingdown to his shoulders.

•In Iowa, if the temperature fell below zero,

we could eat fried cornmeal mush for breakfast.When it rose to fifty,we could wear spring jack-ets. Above eighty, we could swim. I love to knowthe temperature. I have never met farm boyswho could swim well. They could strike a base-ball cruelly, and they could play pinochle. Un-til I was fourteen, I never saw my uncles withouta card table between them. Their silence wasnot with each other. They had their own boys.There is not a single piece of his own good workthat a farmer does with his mouth. Open it andout comes the weather.

•The first time I heard my father swear, the

word was "hell." He said, "What the hell do youthink you're doing?" I was playing with a friendat the high snowy bank where the railroad trackspassed the graveyard. We had sent my brotherhome because he was cold. We lived two blocksaway, straight back the tracks, two houses in,easy, even for a kid. He had turned up frozenarid had to be soaked in a lukewarm bath. Mymother, too, almost froze to death as a child.She told of the sleep that nearly overcame her.As a boy I could picture the yard lights burning.across the snow, too far away to reach, too faraway to keep her awake.

•The borders of character are permeable. I dis-

trust any man who claims to have had a contin-uous friendship with his father. How did he getfrom fourteen to twenty-six? How well does heknow his father, or himself? The disputatioustime for me was the late Sixties. I notice now thatit was the one period of my father's life when hewascut off from the country. We lived in the sub-urbs of Sacramento, California. We fought over

Ronald Reagan, over Janis Joplin. We lived inIowa when the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sul-livan. The whole family watched. The Beatlesmade a deep bow.There wasJohn Lennon bend-ing over his Rickenbacker guitar. I said, "Helooks like Captain Kangaroo," and the wholefamily laughed. That laughter has burned in myears for twenty-seven years.

•In the late summer of 1971 my mother died of

leukemia. She was forty-three. She died after aten-year remission, which she believed God hadgranted her-and who will doubt her?-so thatshe might raise her four children to an age ofrelative safety. I, the oldest, was nineteen whenshe died, and callow, through no fault of hers, be-yond my ability to comprehend it now. My fatherassembled his children on a bench in the back-yard and told us that our mother, his wife, haddied in her hospital room earlier that afternoon.Grief scattered us. But before we began to wan-der wherever our feelings carried us-we wouldbump into each other like strangers again andagain over the next few hours-I happened to

[Portrait]

LONG DRIVE

By William Wegman. From a retrospective of hiswork atthe Whitney Museum in New York City this winter. Thedogs pictured here are Fay Ray, right, and her daughter,Battina.

READINGS 39

look at my father's face. It was the face, as Iimagine it now, of Adam as he and Eve were ledaway from the Garden. With this difference:that Eve was the Garden from which my fatherwas led away alone.

•When we moved into the Sacramento house,

it had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a lawn.When we moved out, it had five bedrooms, threebathrooms, a new hallw~y,a new kitchen, garden,

[Poem]

BACKYARD

By John Tranter. FromThe Penguin Book of Mod-em Australian Poetry, edited by Tranter and PhilipMead and published by Penguin Books Australia.Tranter is the poetry editor of The Bulletin, a week-ly business and arts magazine published in Sydney.A "Southerly Buster" is a cold, gusty wind that oc-casianallyblows along the southeast coast of Australia.

The God of Smoke listens idly in the heatto the barbecue sausages

speaking the language of rain deceitfullyas their fat dances.

Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky sheltersits threatening weather.

A screen door slams, and the kids come tumblingout of their arguments,

and the barrage of shouting begins, concerningyoung Sandra and Scott

and the broken badminton racquet and netand the burning meat.

Is that a Fifties home movie or the realthing? Heavens, how

a child and a beach ball in natural colorcan break your heart.

And the brown dog worries the khaki grassto stop it from growing .

iri place of his worship, the burying bone.The bone that stinks.

Tum now to the God of this tattered arenawatching over the rites

of passage-marriage, separation, adolescenceand troubled maturity:

having servedunder that bright skyyoumaylookupbut don't ask too much:'

some cold beer, a fewold friends in the afrernoon,a Southerly Buster at dusk.

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MAY 1992

toolshed, woodshop, patio, child's fort raised onpoles, and a doughboy pool. My father had erect-ed a portable sawmill in the driveway. Therewas a trailer parked under the plane tree. Therewere chickens in the garden. At family reunionswe pour cement. We do the work ourselves. Iremember how modem, how Californian I feltwhen my dad remarried. We saw the honeymooncouple off at the airport and then we childrendrove ourselves home. They were bound forOaxaca. Soon my dad and Sally,his new wife,willhave been married for as long as my mother and

-father were married. Sally was as sadly damagedby death as my father. It is hard to say who savedwhom, but both were saved, and the childrenwere, too.

•And yet I remember the evenings in that last

long summer of my mother's life, when we hadnot been told what our parents knew. She and myfather left the dinner table and walked outthrough the backyard to a bench beneath theapricot tree. Sometimes they sat and sometimesthey walked among the rows of com and beansjust past the grape arbor. Their movements weregraceful, slow. Soon the delta breeze carried offthe heat of day.'We could see them there as wecleared the table, and we did not know what wewere looking at. None of us was ever again soblessed by ignorance.

•Now my father is rebuilding his childhood.

He has an International Harvester tractor,fourteen acres of good pasture grown up in ryegrass, a bam, and some cattle. The land is notas flat as it was in Iowa, nor as steep as it wasin Colorado. I notice that I am rebuilding myfather's childhood, too. I have some pasture. Ican see the use for some of his tools, the chainsaw, the come-along, the winch. I rememberthe moment when I first realized that I re-sembled my father. Every son does. There is aspectral flash of recognition. Any woman youknow sees the resemblance too plainly. I wouldlike to be discovering now the ways I resem-ble my mother, too.

•The borders of character are permeable. When

the gods gave farmers silence, they also gavethem the power to mean great things by it. Wordsbecome a frail chattering on those prairies. As aboy, my father drove a horse team. An ancientmetaphor for writing is derived from the move-ment of a team of oxen. The farmer walks behindthem, clucking and singing. Birds hop in theirpath. The oxen bend to the yoke and in theearth a furrow is turned. The furrow is the lineof words on the page. The page is the earth. Thewriter turns the team homeward. The birds riseinto the sky and vanish. _