Driving Home, page 3
Still, it’s always the business of the patient reader to learn to live in a language not—or not quite—his own. Empson made himself extraordinarily fluent in seventeenth-century English by immersing himself in controversies—social, political, and theological—that had long been lost to view, and by digging deep into the private lives of writers who excited him, like Donne, Marvell, and Milton. His visits to the England of the 1600s were not made in the spirit of conventional historical or literary scholarship, but as a fierce partisan. He took sides. He relished battles. In a tribute to I. A. Richards, he wrote that “The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.” He treated the writing of the past as a foreign country—every bit as foreign as Japan or China, where he taught in the 1930s and 1940s—in which he established himself as a model traveler, acquiring the local dialect, adapting himself to the local codes and customs, and returning with fresh and invigorating news of a world three hundred years distant from his own.
In 1971, ten years after first reading Seven Types, I met Empson in London. He’d recently retired from his chair at the University of Sheffield and was living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens—in a setup described by Robert Lowell as a “household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer.” Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to explode. Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses. After an alarming lunch, he and I would set off in my car to raid the Wallace Collection, the Sir John Soane museum, or some unsuspecting country house in Buckinghamshire or Hertfordshire where, Empson had found out, a family portrait of an ancestor distantly connected with Marvell hung on the walls. Doorstepping a secluded mansion, deep in its landscaped park, at the end of a long and gated drive, he displayed an imperious persistence, refused to take no for an answer, and forced our entry past nonplussed butlers and feebly protesting dowagers. I delighted in the disquiet that Empson gave such people. During the time I knew him, his luxuriant moustache varied in cut from Fu Manchu to Colonel Blimp; he was, always, legendarily scruffy, but his commanding, high-pitched, singsong voice announced his lapsed membership of the landowning classes, and the dowager and butler were clearly uncertain as to whether they were confronting Lord Emsworth in his cups or an unusually determined Kleeneze salesman.
At this time, he was engaged in a campaign to prove that Marvell, late in his life, had married his London landlady, Mary Palmer. This is a question that has interested nobody very much, before or since. But it greatly concerned Empson, who needed to know the full character of the author of “The Garden” and the “Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”: not knowing would be to leave Marvell’s moral identity in a state of ambiguous incompletion, and Empson meant to get to the bottom of the matter. Delving into the knotted tangle of Marvell’s legal, sexual, and financial affairs in the 1670s—freely speculating and imagining whenever documentary evidence was lacking—he was simply expanding his reading of the poems into a larger reading of the man, the times, and the language in which his subject lived and spoke. He was the best close reader of literature alive, but his definition of “reading” was infinitely more generous and catholic than that of the New Critics who were his immediate contemporaries and with whom he skirmished, often furiously.
He remains for me a touchstone figure. Faced with a book for review, a poem, a picture, a movie, a stretch of inhabited countryside, a speech, a staged event, I instinctively wonder how Empson might have read it, and think ruefully of how much he would have discovered in it. The pieces that follow are readings—most of them of the American landscape, literature, and politics, along with some backward glances to England that may betray a lurking nostalgia for a society more settled in its shape, more instinctively known, than the one I live in now. I haven’t tried to corral them under thematic headings but have left them in more or less the same order in which they were written. It would be nice to think they can be read as the unfinished chronicle of my attempt to make a home in a place I continue to find fascinating, bizarre, ugly, beautiful, repellent, and generous and whose language I’m still trying to learn.
Seattle, October 2009
* Empson flattered his readers with unexplained allusions, expecting them to be as well read as he was himself. The line from Virgil translates roughly as “each stretching out his hand in longing for the far shore,” and describes the dead souls in the underworld awaiting transport across the Styx by Charon, the ferryman. It had been cited by A. C. Bradley in his 1901 lecture, “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” for the untranslatable beauty of its sound (hence, “the stock line to try on the dog”). I hasten to add that I found all this out in 2009, forty-eight years after reading it on the bus, when my O-level Latin wasn’t up to more than dim guesswork about hands and riverbanks and love.
Driving Home
IN THE SPRING of 1990 I packed up as much of my life in London as would fit into a suitcase and four large plywood boxes and flew to Seattle to set up house. It was a selfish and irregular move. I had “met someone” and liked what I’d seen of the Pacific Northwest during a two-month stay there the previous autumn. I liked the aquarium lighting, the sawtooth alps forested with black firs, the compact cities encrusted in dirty Romanesque stucco. Most of all, I liked the place’s wateriness. At forty-seven I felt cracked and dry. My new home territory was as rainy as Ireland, puddled with lakes and veined with big rivers. Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.
We took a house on the wrong side of Queen Anne, the innermost of Seattle’s hilltop suburbs. The tall wooden house, built like a boat from massive scantlings of Douglas fir, carvel-planked with cedar, had been put up in 1906, in the wake of the Yukon gold rush, when the hill itself was logged. It had warped and settled through a string of minor earthquakes: the floors sloped, doors hung askew in their frames, and on a silent night it groaned and whiffled like a sleeping dog.
Barely a mile from the new banking and insurance skyscrapers of downtown, the house felt as if it were hidden away in the woods. Shaggy conifers, survivors of the original forest, darkened the views from every window. The study looked down over the Ship Canal, where trawlers stalked through an avenue of poplars on their start to the Alaskan fishing grounds, eight hundred miles to the north. From the top-floor deck one could see out over the pale suburbs, like shell-middens, to the serrated line of the Cascade Mountains, still snow-capped in May.
For someone fresh off the plane from London, it was a vast prospect in which making oneself at home would not be easy. It had been fine to be a tourist in this landscape, when I had been enjoyably awed by its far-western heights and distances; but now that I’d signed up as a permanent resident, the view from the window seemed only to reflect my own displacement.
Even the very near-at-hand was strange. I kept Peterson’s Western Birds and the Audubon Guide to Western Forests by the typewriter. I made lists and pinned them to the wall. Cedar, cypress, dogwood, laurel, madrona, maple, I wrote, trying to distinguish individual personalities in the jumble of damp and muddy greens framed by the window. I took the tree book down to the garden and, wary of attracting derisive looks from the neighbors, matched the real-life barks against their close-up color pictures; the peeling, fish-scale skin of the lodgepole pine, the frayed hemp rope of the western red cedar. It took a month, at least, to be able to see the black-crested Steller’s jay in the madrona with something like the comfortable indifference with which I’d used to notice a song thrush in the sycamore in Battersea. It took a good deal longer to adjust to how adeptly the rufous hummingbird, like a tiny thrashing autogyro, redisposed itself in space, zapping from point to point too fast for the eye to follow. Glancing up from the typewriter, stuck for a phrase, I’d catch sight of a bald eagle slowly circling on a thermal over the Ship Canal, its huge wings still and ragged, and lose the logic of the sentence to another half hour of involuntary ornithology.
The German word for “uncanny,” as in Freud’s famous essay on the Uncanny, is unheimlich—unhomely. The tourist thrives on the uncanny, moving happily through a phenomenal world of effects without causes. This world, in which he has no experience and no memory, is presented to him as a supernatural domain: the language of travel advertising hawks the uncanny as part of the deal. Experience the magic of Bali! The wonders of Hawaii! The enchantment of Bavaria!
But for the newly arrived immigrant, this magic stuff is like a curse. He’s faced at every turn with the unhomelikeness of things, in an uncanny realm where the familiar house sparrows have all fled, to be replaced by hummingbirds and eagles. The immigrant needs to grow a memory, and grow it fast. Somehow or other, he must learn to convert the uncanny into the homely, in order to find a stable footing in the new land.
Hunkered down in the second-floor study of the comfortingly old and memorious house on Queen Anne, I tried to read my way home. My best guides were fellow aliens in the Pacific Northwest, from the early explorers of the region to such relatively recent arrivals here as the poet Theodore Roethke and the novelist Bernard Malamud. From the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth, they kept striking the same note of shock at the stupendous unhomelikeness of this landscape.
It drove George Vancouver into a pit of what now appears to have been clinical depression. Between May and June of 1792, as he probed the inlets of Washington and British Columbia, he went from dizzy elation to sullen melancholy—and wrote his changing moods into the permanent nomenclature of the region. To begin with, he was high on his discoveries: this was “the most lovely country that can be imagined.” He saw the Pacific Northwest as a kind of unusually verdant Devonshire, and imagined orderly villages with churches and manors laid out between the wooded hills. At this stage of the voyage, the names he gave to the headlands, bays, and fiords were upbeat: Discovery Bay, Protection Island, Restoration Point (the most beautiful and useful features, like Mount Rainier and Port Townsend, were named by Vancouver after his relations, friends, and patrons).
May turned into June. As Vancouver sailed north, the mountains grew steeper, the inlets narrower, the woods more impenetrable. His lieutenant, Peter Puget, who kept a parallel journal, was increasingly excited by the romantic sublimity of what he saw: a few years younger than Vancouver, he was much more in tune with the rising generation’s taste for wild nature. For Puget, the unfolding landscape was “majestic” and full of “grandeur”; for Vancouver it was increasingly “dreary,” “unpleasant,” “desolate,” “gloomy,” “dismal,” and “awful”—the words pepper his descriptions, often being used twice in the same sentence. Five minutes north of the fiftieth parallel, Vancouver brought his ship to a “dreary and unpleasant anchorage”: “Our residence here was truly forlorn; an awful silence pervaded the gloomy forests, whilst animated nature seemed to have deserted the neighbouring country …” He called the place Desolation Sound.
Thirteen years after the Vancouver expedition, in the autumn of 1805, Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia River valley from the continental interior, after climbing to the headwaters of the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains in what is now Montana. William Clark, with his botched spellings and childish exclamation marks, was a resoundingly lively presence on the page. He was an original vernacular narrator as he confided his discomforts, Dear Diary–style, to his journal. “O! how horriable is the day—” he wrote when the tidal Columbia cut up rough in a westerly gale and waves drenched the explorers’ camp. “We are all wet and disagreeable.” Clark had grown up in Virginia and Kentucky, and, like almost every newcomer to the Northwest, was incredulous at the monotonous fall rains that soaked the country west of the Cascades. It rained day after day, hour after hour—with the fine-sifted thoroughness and regularity of a gigantic lawn sprinkler. “This morning Cloudy and drisley.” “Rained all the last night we are all wet.” “Rain as usual.” “Rained without intermition.” “A blustering rainey day.” “A hard rain all the last night we again get wet.” “Rained verry hard.” “Confined on a tempiest coast, wet.” The swollen river carried with it the trunks of uprooted trees, “maney of them nearly 200 feet long”; as they spun around and around on the current, they often came close to capsizing the expedition’s canoes. “Those monsterous trees—” wrote Clark, summoning the vocabulary of the uncanny to convey the gross abundance of this landscape.
In 1947 Theodore Roethke came west to Seattle, drawn here by the offer of a job in the English department at the University of Washington. The city itself (“a kind of vast Scarsdale … no bars for anything except beer and light wines in the whole of Seattle”) was tame and provincial, but the surrounding landscape roused Roethke, as it had roused Vancouver, to flights of concentrated pathetic fallacy. Before 1947, his poems had been full of emotional turmoil projected onto a vivid vegetable world of crocuses, geraniums, cyclamens, peaches, butternuts, pear trees, and spiders—a world enclosed by the same fences that bordered his father’s market garden and nursery in Saginaw, Michigan. In the Pacific Northwest (“… the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists / Changing with every twist of wind …”) Roethke found a nature that was extravagant enough to give physical body to the extremes of his own morbidly dishevelled nature.
His new poems mapped a wild, volcanic, thickly forested region of the heart and mind. In the geological melodrama of the Washington landscape, he found a spectacular objective correlative to the upheavals of his mental life—the uncontrollable ascents into mania, the whiskey, the compulsive womanizing. His last collection, The Far Field, posthumously published in 1964, is an inspired gazetteer of places that are simultaneously states of mind and visitable destinations within easy reach of Seattle. “Journey to the Interior,” for instance, is both a fine description of driving on a logging trail in the Cascades (Roethke bought his first car, a Buick, in 1950, when he was forty-two and was thereafter an enthusiastic—and alarming—motorist) and a lightly encoded account of a life spent skirting the edge of insanity:
In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge …
As the mountains represented the menacing heights, the rivers, lakes, and sea afforded renewal and balm. Roethke wrote beautifully about water, its movements and stillnesses. In the mental hospital, he spent long hours in hydrotherapy; sane, he found another kind of hydrotherapy, fishing for coho salmon from the Oyster River resort on the east coast of Vancouver Island, watching birds on Lake Washington, walking on the rocky margin of Puget Sound, watching small waves break. From “The Rose”:
I live with the rocks, their weeds,
Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh
Edges, their holes
Cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash
Of the long swell,
The oily, tar-laden walls
Of the toppling waves,
Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds,
And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands.
Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,
Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,
As if another man appeared out of the depth of my being …
It was exciting to watch Roethke making himself at home in western Washington by discovering that western Washington had always, as it were, been inside himself. To the view that I could see from my own window, Roethke attached names and meanings that went far deeper than Vancouver’s. Of all the incomers to the Northwest, who had put this landscape to use and made cognitive sense of it, from fur traders and timber barons to aeronautical engineers and Dutch bulb-growers, Roethke was the most generous: if a stranger had as baggage nothing except Roethke’s Collected Poems, he would have a solid imaginative foothold here.
In 1949, Bernard Malamud left New York to take a job as an instructor in the English department at Oregon State College in Corvallis, lately an agricultural school. In 1961, he returned to the East Coast, where he had been appointed writer-in-residence at Bennington College in Vermont—and published his third novel, A New Life, a bitter comedy about a New York Jew, an English instructor, who finds himself stranded in a narrow-minded town in the wide-open country of the Pacific Northwest. Malamud’s revenge on Oregon (as it was generally perceived by Oregonians) had for a long time been my favorite campus novel—though for years I believed that it was set in an invented landscape, a fabulous Far West that Malamud had cooked up in his Manhattan fastness.
I had come across the book in 1964, in the paperback carousel at the new service station at Newport Pagnell on the M1 motorway. The cover was suggestive. Above the blurb, “He found strange refuge—love with another man’s wife,” was a drawing of a young woman reaching for the zip of her Levi’s. The man in the background was small and wore a hat. I knew Malamud’s name from the stylized short stories of New York Jewish life in Idiots First. I hadn’t heard of this surprising novel.
