I WAS BORN east of the heights of New Rochelle in the watershed of New York’s Mamaroneck River in the winter of 1945. In the spring of 1948 my father, a billboard advertising executive, would move us away, to a home in rural California at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains in the San Fernando Valley, far from this suburban landscape just thirty miles from New York City. I would never know why. Perhaps the move was an effort to save a marriage gone awry, or maybe he hoped to capitalize on prospects in southern California after the war.
For a long time I thought of California as the beginning, the place where my life took a distinctive shape, but something had already begun. When I recall incidents from those first three years in New York, some still vivid as a bowl of oranges on a summer windowsill, several seem to bear directly on my later life, to be adumbrations. Or perhaps that is only how memory works.
We lived on the second floor of a six-story apartment building situated on Orienta Point in the town of Mamaroneck. It faced onto Mamaroneck Harbor, an embayment of Long Island Sound. My parents, avid sailors, had a membership in the Nanhook Yacht Club, which was affiliated with “The Orienta”—a primary attraction for people who chose to live there.
A great lawn sloped north from the building down to a seawall and a narrow beach, off which sailboats were moored. My earliest memories are of crawling off a blanket onto this cool, prickly turf under a huge elm. Flower beds had been planted along the building’s east side, and I remember walking in them with my mother to pick flowers as tall as I was. I remember the aroma of the soil in summer and the way the bare earth puckered to a dry crust after an early morning watering.
The odor and the flowers’ colors in the garden attracted me. To ensure visits there with Mother, I’d sometimes line my alphabet blocks up on a windowsill—our windows were right above the gardens—and push them out. She’d take me along to retrieve them while she gathered bouquets.
I also remember the glare of light on the harbor and the snap of white sails coming taut in a breeze. In warm weather I was closely watched like other children on the beach, but I recall wading out into the water as if I were alone, and wanting to go farther. I could see across to Shootfly Island and the estuary of Otter Creek. Away to the east, where Turkey Rock and Hen Island stood out, lowlying Peningo Neck protected the harbor from the open waters of the Sound.
Standing in seawater stirred to wavelets by the wind, my head thrown back, I’d turn slowly to gaze at the towering crown of the elm, backlit and twinkling in noon light, turn and catch the long horizon of the sound to the east, keep turning to follow scudding sailboats on that wind. On the hottest days I sought out the shade of the big elm, but I would go back in the water again to experience that peculiar yearning—to swim, to sail, to go. I would wait in the water for something to emerge, to appear in that empty space above its surface.
Shortly after my brother was born in 1948, my father drove out to California. My mother and brother and I flew west afterward in a Constellation. (I remember a living-room-like atmosphere at the rear of this plane, where couch seats were arranged in a horseshoe around a table, and going into the terminal at Love Field in Dallas with one of the stewardesses to eat dinner while my mother attended to my infant brother.) My parents divorced two years later, and my mother began raising us with a dedication I would not understand or appreciate for years. She taught home economics during the day at a junior high school; twice a week she taught night school at a junior college. She also worked at home as a dressmaker.
My images of our first house, when I was three or four and my father still lived with us, are of the way it sat apart, surrounded by alfalfa hay fields. Our street was a macadam-surfaced ditch meant to funnel heavy winter rains into the Los Angeles River. It also served as a corridor for heading sheep to summer pastures in the Santa Susanas. On different days we might be stuck in the car for either reason.
After my father left, not to be seen again, Mother bought a small one-bedroom house on a half acre of land in the town of Reseda. For boys my age growing up then in the northern San Fernando Valley, adventure unfolded in fruit orchards and wisteria hedges, in horse pastures and haylofts, and around farming operations, truck gardens, and chicken ranches. During these same years the Los Angeles River channel, another haunt, was floored and walled in concrete, so we saw the last of that river’s natural days. We hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains and we caught rides on slow freights west from Reseda to Canoga Park and back. We rode our bikes out as far as Porter Ranch, the rural fringes of valley settlement where braceros worked the fields and where encounters with coyotes, jackrabbits, and even rattlesnakes were not unusual.
Mother frequently drove my brother, Dennis, and me into the Mojave Desert on weekends, or up to Antelope Valley or away to one of a dozen beaches from Zuma, west of Malibu, to Pismo, up north near San Luis Obispo. We spent summer weeks in camp at Big Bear Lake or with Mother’s friends at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains.
One advantage of growing up in a single-parent home (it wasn’t called that back then, of course; “broken home” was the preferred term) is that if your mother is an interesting or handsome woman, she can attract the attention of interesting men. My brother and I knew several such men, all but one in my memory impeccable in their conduct and generous toward us. I remember picnics at the home of a movie stuntman who kept a rambling, jerry-built house in an unspoiled part of the Calabasas hills, where he’d dammed a creek to create a swimming hole. And picnics at the summer house of a man who was the gentlest person I ever knew, a horticulturalist at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden whom for a long time I wished my mother would marry. With them and Mother I experienced the crash of Pacific storm surf on the deserted beaches of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. I felt the hysteria that came with brush fires fanned by Santa Ana winds and caught the astringent smell of creosote bush after a desert rain.
In the middle of what was, for me, this intensely physical landscape, another man emerged who engaged a different part of my mind. He was an aeronautical engineer at Hughes Aircraft and also an artist. He’d taught my mother painting in college in Alabama and had been her first husband. After their divorce, he moved to California and remarried. When my father left he became like a father to me. He drove a blue-gray sports car, an Austin Healey convertible, and I rode with him swiftly along winding Mulholland Drive above the city and down the broad promenade of the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. One Christmas he built a large layout for my trains, a landscape of papier-mâché mountains and tunnels with a handcrafted bridge and a scenic backdrop he’d painted.
For years I believed my childhood nothing out of the ordinary, but it was a sort of bohemian existence. Mother was strict with Dennis and me about table and social manners. She disciplined us and was conscientious about our schooling and protective of our emotional lives. But I remember no impatience, no indifference toward imagination. She embraced our drawings, our stories, and our Tinkertoy kingdoms, and she drove us to many intriguing places in our green 1934 Ford coupe—to Boulder (later, Hoover) Dam, the La Brea Tar Pits. And she invited engaging, independent men and women to the house for dinner.
The parents of some of my classmates and some of Mother’s friends worked in the motion picture industry and in television, but I do not remember that their professions colored my life in any untoward way. Work in Hollywood, like work at Lockheed or other aircraft companies, didn’t seem any more remarkable to us as children then than farming or teaching. I was more interested, actually, in farming and in what was done by people who worked astride a horse, a mysterious and magnificent beast, with its shuddering flanks and high nickers.
One unusual thing about those years was that I raised pigeons. Many of them were tumblers, a kind of bird that folds its wings and then plummets from a height, only to pull up sharply inches from the ground. A tumbler then beats its way back up into the sky from which it plummets again. Sometimes a dozen or more will tumble together, careening past each other as they fall.
Watching the pigeons fly was an experience so exhilarating I would turn slowly under them in circles of glee. They would spiral above the house before flying off every day, and the tumblers would fall toward an adjacent field. They’d disappear behind lofty banks of aging eucalyptus north and south of the house in flocks of thirty and forty. When they returned in the afternoon, I found that faithfulness, their soft cooing at dusk in the pigeon coop, as soothing as my mother’s fingers running through my hair.
I could not have understood at this age of course, only eight or nine, what it might mean to have a voice one day, to speak as a writer speaks. I would have been baffled by the thought. The world I inhabited—the emotions I imagined horses to have, the sound of a night wind clattering ominously in the dry leaves of eucalyptus trees—I imagined as a refuge, one that would be lost to me if I tried to explain it. The countryside around me was a landscape full of small, wild animals. When I walked alone down windbreaks of Russian olives or up sandy washes and met them, I’d stand still until they went on. They did not seem to my mind animals that wanted to be known.
My future, as I vaguely pictured it then, would include going to high school in the valley, maybe Stanford University afterward, and then perhaps I would work toward owning a farm. Like my friends, though, I had few concrete thoughts beyond repairing my bike and being included at the periphery of the circle of older boys, the ones who possessed such gleaming, loud, extraordinarily powerful, and customized automobiles.
When I was eleven my mother married again, and we moved back East to an apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan on East Thirty-fifth Street. I would live there for six years before going away to college. This change was wrenching: socially, economically, and geographically. I was bewildered by it—a penthouse apartment, Jesuit prep school, Saturday afternoon trapshooting at the New York Athletic Club’s Travers Island range, debutant balls at the Plaza and the Pierre. Gone were the rural, agricultural, and desert landscapes to which I was so attached. They were replaced by summers on the Jersey shore and by visits to eastern Alabama, where my mother had grown up. But, for the first time, I had an allowance. And I began to grasp from my new classmates, all boys, what went with this new life with no cars, where no one bicycled alone at night to the sound of big sprinklers slow-chucking water over alfalfa fields.
I recall a moment that first eastern summer of 1956, a scene I’ve come back to often. My parents put Dennis and me in a summer camp on the North Fork of eastern Long Island for a few weeks. Among my bunkmates were Thom and John Steinbeck, the writer’s two sons. On parents day, John and Elaine Steinbeck would come over from their home in Sag Harbor in a cabin cruiser. He would row a dinghy in to shore to fetch the boys and take them back out for the afternoon to the moored boat. I might have been reading “The Red Pony” or other stories in The Long Valley then. What I most remember, though, was that this man had come here from California, like me, and that things seemed to be going well for him. I was having a difficult time that first summer adjusting to city life. I missed the open-endedness of the other landscape, with its hay fields and its perimeter of unsettled mountains. And what I missed was embodied somehow in this burly man, rowing the boat away with his boys. Before I left for college I read all of Steinbeck’s books. I drew from them a sense of security.
Later that same summer my parents rented a house for a few weeks near Montauk Point, at the tip of Long Island. My father, as I would always refer to him later, took my brother and me fishing several times on charter boats. As it happened, Peter Matthiessen—a writer I would later come to admire and get to know—was captaining just such a boat out of Montauk that August. Thirty years later, crossing Little Peconic Bay to the west of Montauk with him, in a boat he was thinking of buying, we tried to determine whether it could have been his boat that my father had hired one of those times.
I thrived in the city in spite of the change in landscape. I focused on my studies—Latin, history, English literature, French, art (a class taught by the painter John Sloan’s widow)—a standard Jesuit regimen, light in the sciences. I developed into a fast, strong athlete, and graduated with letters in three varsity sports and a scholastic average high enough to have gained me entry to almost any university.
I felt privileged rather than deserving of all this. I understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world. In my private heart, though, thinking back to the years in California and forgetting those early days of privilege at Orienta Point, I felt I was dressed in borrowed clothes. How did I come to be here?
The summer after I graduated from high school I traveled to Europe with fifteen of my classmates. We flew to Lisbon and then spent two months being driven in a small Fiat tour bus with huge windows through Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and West Germany. Later we crossed the Channel and toured England and Ireland. Among hundreds of things I did, I remember laying my hand on the thigh of Agesander’s statue of Laocoön in the Vatican Museums and feeling the sinew of muscle in the white marble; seeing a matador gored and then spun like a pinwheel on a bull’s horn in the corrida in Pamplona; an ethereal light that seemed to bathe Napoleon’s catafalque in blue in Paris; and a vast cemetery of identical white crosses, ranked over green hills in northern France, a bucolic landscape lovely, benign, and enormously sad.
In the fall of 1962 I entered the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. Once I got my driver’s license I began leaving school on weekends, camping out or sleeping in the cars I borrowed, whatever was necessary to see the surrounding country from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to West Virginia. I once drove to Mississippi and back with my roommate over a weekend—eleven hundred miles—just to see it, drawn by little more than the lure of the Natchez Trace.
During my sophomore and junior years I started writing stories that had nothing to do with classroom assignments. I understood the urge to write as a desire to describe what happened, what I saw, when I went outside. The book that engaged me most along these lines was Moby-Dick, which I read three times before I entered college.
Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.
My attitude toward language and story crystallized on a single afternoon in my sophomore year. I cut a class to hear Robert Fitzgerald read from his new translation of The Odyssey. I’d heard the translation was brillnant; what was spellbinding about his reading, however, was the way the audience became galvanized in beauty by his presentation. History, quest, longing, metered prose, moral consternation, and fantastic image all came together in that room. The feeling broadened and calmed us. Whatever Fitzgerald did in that hour, that’s what I wanted to do.
I was driven to write, but of course anguished over my efforts. Who was I to speak? What had I to say? As a college student of nineteen, I was being encouraged in the idea that if I spoke I would be heard. The privilege that ensured this, however, was the accident of my mother’s third marriage. It was nothing I’d earned. And much of what seemed to me so worth addressing—the psychological draw of landscape, that profound mystery I sensed in wild animals (which reading Descartes had done nothing to dissuade)—was regarded as peculiar territory by other nascent writers at the university.
In my senior year at Notre Dame, at bat in an intramural baseball game, I took a high inside pitch that shattered the stone in my senior ring. I left the setting empty. The emptiness came to symbolize doubts I’d developed about my education. I’d learned a lot, but I had not learned it in the presence of women or blacks or Jews or Koreans. Something important, those refinements and objections, had been omitted.
When I departed the university in 1966 (with a degree in Communication Arts) I left in order to discover a voice and a subject, though this was not at all clear then. I floundered in two jobs for a year, married, finished a graduate degree with the thought that I would teach prep school, and then entered the master of fine arts program in writing at the University of Oregon. I left that program after only a semester, but matriculated at the university for more than a year, during which time I met a singular teacher in the English department, a man named Barre Toelken. He helped me frame the questions seething inside me then about how justice, education, and other Enlightenment ideals could be upheld against the depth of prejudice and the fields of ignorance I saw everywhere around me.
Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred. They did not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the immanence of the divine in both. And they regarded landscape as a component as integral to the development of personality and social order as we take the Oedipus complex and codified law to be.
As a guest in the Toelkens’ home, I frequently met scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture. I didn’t consider that these people spoke a truth no one else possessed; but, listening to them, I saw the inadequacy of my education. It lacked any suggestion that these voices were necessary, that they were relevant. Further, it became clear to me in the Toelkens’ home that their stories, despite the skilled dramatizing of human triumph and failure, were destined for quarantine in the society of which I was a part. I was not going to find these voices in American magazines.
In the years after those first encounters with senior Native American men, itinerant Asian poets, black jazz musicians, and translators, I deliberately began to seek the company of people outside my own narrow cultural bounds. I was drawn especially to men and women who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.
The effect of these encounters was not a belief that I was now able to speak for such people—a notion I find dangerous as well as absurd—but an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the only voice. My truth was not the one truth. My tongue did not compose a pinnacle language. These other voices were as indispensable to our survival as variations in our DNA.
In my earliest essays, I wanted to report what others were thinking, and I was driven by a feeling that these other voices were being put asunder by “progress” in its manifold forms.
Although I’m wary of pancultural truths, I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one’s life. Wherever I’ve traveled—Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan—I’ve found that the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.
As long as it took for me to see that a writer’s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire, that it could not rise legitimately out of the privilege of race or gender or social rank, so did it take time to grasp the depth of cruelty inflicted upon all of us the moment voices are silenced, when for prejudicial reasons people are told their stories are not valuable, not useful. Anyone educated in the existence and history of metaphorical expression—Schrödinger’s or Li Po’s—cannot help but recoil before such menace, such ignorance.
ONCE I WAS asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, “Tell your daughter three things.” Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell’s observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.
Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.
Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.
Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust.
IN THE PAGES that follow, you will see how this thinking has played out for me. My beliefs will be apparent, but not, I hope, obtrusive. And it will be obvious that I have left town, or tried to, and that I’ve wanted to put to work what I saw. I’ve chosen these essays to give a sense of how one writer proceeds, and they are reflective of my notion of what it means to travel. The order is not chronological, and I’ve not included all the work of recent years.
If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it’s to contribute to a literature of hope. With my given metaphors, rooted in a childhood spent outdoors in California and which take much of their language from Jesuit classrooms in New York City, I want to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns.
Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is a part. When I write, I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen—a wild animal fleeing through creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance. Or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons, and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.