The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates
How like a ballad or a folk song this story is, in the melancholy simplicity of its telling! Yet the story has an unexpectedly upbeat ending, a reversal of (Oedipal) expectations—the son doesn’t fight the father, though the interior of a crude country tavern would be an ideal setting for such an encounter.
Said my father Frederic, now in his seventies, shaking his head with a bemused smile, “Jesus! I couldn’t bring myself to hit anyone that old.”
THE IRISH WILL BREAK your heart.
When I traveled to Ireland (to attend a literary festival) and made inquiries, I was told that “Oates” was not a common name but that there were “Oateses” in the west of Ireland—somewhere.
The Irishwoman who told me this did not sound very certain. I recall that she frowned thoughtfully—as if there might be something about “Oates” that wasn’t so very positive, which she did not wish to suggest.
Very likely, these Oateses suspected to dwell somewhere in the west of Ireland were relatives of Joseph Carlton Oates, distant relatives by the time of the late twentieth century. My father’s father had been born in Ireland, I think; or, he’d been brought to the United States as a young boy, in the late 1880s. How, why Joseph Carlton Oates found his way to the small barge canal town of Lockport where he met and married Blanche Morgenstern, and became a young, presumably restless father with a weakness for alcohol and no great love for domesticity—there was no one to tell me, and so I do not know.
In my novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter, written after my grandmother Blanche’s death, I have tried to evoke the mysterious life of my grandmother in those long-ago years. But Carlton Oates is present only by analogy: the hard-drinking, abusive and treacherous man who, if you make the mistake of loving him, will break your heart; if you make the mistake of marrying him, he will abandon you and your child.
It was said in the family—(though never when my grandmother Blanche was within earshot)—that Joseph Carlton and Frederic resembled each other dramatically. Identical thick, cresting black hair with a widow’s peak, heavy brows, strikingly handsome features. The identical air of the quick-tempered, easily insulted male of a shabbily glamorous era best embodied, in popular culture, in the menacing swagger of Robert Mitchum (one of the few Hollywood actors whom my father admired, perhaps because Mitchum was the antithesis of the Hollywood leading man). Though I resemble my father, and so too this long-deceased Irish grandfather, I never saw Joseph Carlton’s face, not even in a photograph.
And so, the “lost” Irish grandfather is an enigma to me. Never have I dared to ask questions directly, for in our family that isn’t done, but by degrees I have come to form an impression of him from my father’s offhanded remarks. This (seemingly) cruel, selfish, difficult and yet attractive man of whom my grandmother Blanche, who never speaks ill of anyone, will say only, stiffly, that he was “no good.”
Yet Blanche Morgenstern must have fallen in love with Joseph Oates, as a girl of eighteen or nineteen; if she revised her judgment of the man afterward, still the fact remains—they were married, and my father was their only child. And I am descended from him, the elusive Irish Oates.
In this way Joseph Carlton Oates has become one of those phantom family members, common in many families perhaps, whose very historical existence must be taken on faith.
A paradigm, perhaps, for the elusive Other—the very romance of prose fiction that is both the quest for this obscure object of desire and the apprehension that the object’s existence may be highly “fictitious.”
THIS IS NOT FACT, but theory. If Joseph Carlton Oates had not abandoned his young wife and son in 1916 but continued to live with them, isn’t it likely that given his drinking and his predilection for settling matters with his fists he would have been abusive to both his wife and his son; would (probably) have beaten my father repeatedly, so infecting Frederic (if we can believe theories of the tragic etiology of domestic violence) with a similar predilection for violence. What then of my father’s behavior as husband, father? In my life in Millersport I’d observed many times my father’s quick temper, and his smoldering anger, but I had never observed him reacting violently, that is “physically,” to anyone, nor even threatening to do so. And so it is possible that abandoning his young family to poverty in Lockport, in 1916, was an unintended gesture of kindness: perhaps the most magnanimous gesture my mysterious grandfather Joseph Carlton Oates could have made.
But I won’t suggest this to my father, I think. No one should try to come between a man and his memory of his father however embittered or bemused.
IN A MEMOIR OF her early childhood the poet Alicia Ostriker describes her father, a pharmacist, as a “kindly” man; a man of the Jewish tradition of “kindly” husbands, fathers, community members. Kindness as a tradition! In the America of my family’s past there was no tradition of “kindness” in men; indeed, “kindness” as a cultivated virtue would have seemed unnatural, unmanly. (In fact, unknown to him, Fred Oates’s maternal grandparents were German Jews who had emigrated to the United States in the late 1890s, changed their name and so successfully remade themselves into no-religion, no-ethnicity, that no one knew their background. The time-honored American-frontier tradition of making yourself into nothing.) But for much of his life my father Frederic Oates belonged to another tradition, you might say, in which (male) violence, the American romance of (male) violence, was unquestioned.
In this tradition there were two kinds of men: those who were willing/eager to fight, and those who were not willing/eager to fight, thus “unmanly.”
The tradition has nothing inherently to do with guns. It is an American-frontier value of another kind, that has to do with male self-respect and male protectiveness of family. Despite my father’s intelligence, talent (for art, music), and common sense, Fred Oates was no exception to the ethic of his time, place, and social class.
Though never stated explicitly, a code of ethics prevailed:
A man does not strike a woman or a child.
A man must maintain his dignity at all costs.
Except in special circumstances, a man does not back down from a fight.
Thus/and: A man must always be prepared to fight.
For such men, boxing was the most profound sport, as boxing would not have seemed like a “sport” at all but rather something deeper and more primal, analogous to their own lives as sports involving play, teams, balls would not.
No man would not follow American boxing. No man would have to stop to think who the current heavyweight or middleweight champion of the world was.
One of my childhood memories is of my mother pleading with my father not to drive back to confront a hitchhiker who had (evidently) made an obscene gesture when my father had driven past him on Transit Road, my mother in the passenger’s seat and my brother and me in the backseat. My father was furious, red-faced; it wasn’t just that he had been insulted, but that my mother had seen the gesture too, and possibly, as Daddy thought, my brother and me. (Reading comic books in the back of the car, I hadn’t noticed a thing.) Despite my mother begging him not to drive back, my father did—with what results, we never knew. (At least, my brother and I never knew.) Did my father challenge the hitchhiker to a fight? Did they fight? Very likely, the hitchhiker was astonished that my father had driven back to confront him, and probably, or possibly, he had apologized and there was no exchange of blows.
(As an adult now, I am most sympathetic with my mother. I am trying to imagine how she must have felt when my father drove back to confront a stranger who might have been mentally ill, might have had a concealed weapon, or might have been stronger than my father, or more desperate—these possibilities my mother must have anxiously contemplated.)
A man never backs down from a fight.
It wasn’t surprising to learn that my grandfather Joseph Carlton was a man who used his fists but it was surprising to learn that he’d sought out his own son to fight. And it was consoling to learn that my father, hotheaded as he’d been at th
“We had a few beers together. That was it. My old man drove back to Buffalo, and I never saw him again.”
IT WAS A FEATURE of his early life, with his (single) mother, that my father moved frequently in Lockport, from one low-priced rental to another. He worked at numerous jobs—Palace Theater organist, sign painter; machine shop at Harrison’s—and soon became self-supporting. Eventually, his mother remarried, a man named Bob Woodside, whom my father did not like, or of whom he did not approve—I don’t think we ever knew why. (When my grandmother Blanche came by Greyhound bus to visit us each week, my step-grandfather never accompanied her. My memory is of an older man, gray-haired, not unattractive, perhaps a factory worker, or an employee of a small Lockport business, who avidly read pulp magazines—True Detective, science fiction—and who smoked cigars.) For a brief while when my parents were first married they lived in Lockport, in “Lowertown”—then moved out to Millersport to live in the upper half of the Bushes’ farmhouse.
At this time, in November 1988, my parents live on the same property on Transit Road, but in a small ranch-style house (built 1961) with white aluminum siding, neat brown trim, and an enormous front lawn which is my father’s responsibility to mow with a tractor-mower. Some of the pear trees remain, but the old farmhouse of my childhood has long vanished.
The old hay barn, that had badly needed repair when I’d been a girl, has long vanished. My grandfather’s smithy. The mound of rubble that contained broken horseshoes, rusted spikes. The silo in which a child might have suffocated, the chicken coop and all of the chicken yard and the wire fence surrounding it.
All of that ghostly flock of Rhode Island Reds, vanished. Beloved Happy Chicken a fading memory.
Yet nearby, on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Pendleton, the ruins of the old Judd house remain on an untended lot as if in mockery.
(Where has Helen Judd gone? What has become of the Judd children? No one in Millersport will claim to know.)
The generation that preceded my parents has long vanished. First-generation Americans, many of them; or immigrants from Hungary, Ireland, Germany.
My grandmother Blanche died after a lengthy illness, a form of cancer, in 1970. So reluctant were family members to speak of my grandmother’s illness, and so undisposed was my grandmother to speak of herself, I never knew that my grandmother was seriously ill until her cancer was advanced. Belatedly I learned that my grandmother had not wanted me to know about her illness—she had not wanted to upset me.
In the hospital she assured me, with her calm smile: “I don’t mind.”
Gently Grandma squeezed my hand, to comfort me. I was stunned, stricken to the heart. I could not even cry—yet.
I don’t mind. These words are so deeply imprinted in my soul, I think that a kind of anesthesia has overcome me; where I should be feeling strongly, there is a block, a cutting-short like a gentle rebuke—I don’t mind.
(And so, when people ask me the maddening, socially mandated how are you? how are you feeling?—I have no reply except a bone-chillingly cheery, “Fine! And you?”)
Of course, my grandmother was medicated. I know that. It was not my grandmother Blanche but the medication that spoke, to assure others what might have been true about her final hours of consciousness, or might not have been true in quite that way—I don’t mind.
Joyce’s grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, Lockport, New York, 1917.
On a windowsill in my study, facing my desk, is an old, precious photograph of Blanche Morgenstern in her early twenties: a delicately beautiful young woman in a stylish winter coat with fur collar and cuffs, holding a small purse in her ungloved hands; she is wearing a chic wide-brimmed dark hat; her stockings appear to be black, or black-tinged, and her legs and ankles are slim. Beside her is the rough wall of a stone house, behind her the front wheel of a bicycle. Tree limbs are bare and skeletal, the mood of the landscape is winter. Because it is black-and-white, and has no color, this image seems to belong to a time before time—certainly, a time before my birth—before even my parents’ birth. Often for long minutes I stare at the photograph in wonderment: who took this picture? With what sort of camera, so long ago? What is the beautiful young woman in the picture thinking? Is she thinking? Her expression is somber, though she is half-smiling; a Mona Lisa–sort of smile; her beauty suggests a kind of antiquity. This young woman—my grandmother-to-be! How astonished she would have been, how disbelieving.
Everyone who sees this photograph, everyone to whom I have shown it, remarks how closely I resemble Blanche Morgenstern, despite the difference in our ages: the granddaughter now so much older than the grandmother in the photograph.
My Princet on friends also say, “But obviously, your grandmother was Jewish.”
If only my grandmother had acknowledged her Jewish background, and allowed us to speak openly of these family “secrets”—perhaps she would have been less lonely. (Was my grandmother lonely? It is possible that I am imagining an isolation that my grandmother didn’t actually feel; it is just as likely that she felt, every hour of her life, a profound relief that her father had not murdered her, and that the gift of life was hers to accept without a backward glance.)
When Grandma died, her son Fred was deeply grieved, shaken. We had all been prepared for her death and yet—you are never prepared. My mother told me, “Dad is keeping what he feels to himself. He won’t talk to me. You know how Dad is.”
It is the way of some families, to keep emotion tight, tight, tight within—as if grasped by a fist. There is the fear that, if emotion is released, there will be no holding back, ever.
Especially for men like Fred Oates. The more “manly” the man, the more tightly restrained the emotion.
As the escalating notes of “The Erl-King” plunge forward.
FROM MY JOURNAL, 5/20/86:
Last week, my parents came to visit . . . They arrived on Wednesday, left on Saturday afternoon. Immediately the house is too large, empty, quiet, unused . . . My mother brought me a dress she’d sewed for me, blue print, long-sleeved, full-skirted. “Demure”. . .
(Another family secret revealed with a disarming casualness. Perhaps because of their ages my parents don’t want to keep secrets? Not that they are old at seventy or seventy-one. My father told of how his grandfather Morgenstern tried to kill his grandmother in a fit of rage, then killed himself—gun barrel placed under his chin, trigger pulled, (his daughter) Blanche close by. My father was about fifteen at the time. They were all living in a single household . . . A sordid tale. Yet grimly comical: I asked what occupation my great-grandfather had, was told he was a gravedigger.)
(Family secrets! So many! Or no—not so very many, I suppose, but unnerving. And I think of my sweet grandmother Blanche who nearly witnessed her own father’s violent suicide . . . She had come home to find the door locked. Her father was beating her mother upstairs in their bedroom. Hearing her at the door he came downstairs with his gun and for some reason (frustration, drunkenness, madness) he killed himself just inside the locked door. Several times I said to my father, dazed, but you never told me any of this! and my father said with his air of utter placidity, Didn’t I?—I’m sure I did. This is a counter-theme of sorts. The secret is at last revealed, after decades; but it is revealed with the accompanying claim that it had been revealed a long time ago and is not therefore a secret.)
What is unexpected about this unhappy memory of a long-ago attempted murder and suicide is that my grandmother Blanche had already married Joseph Oates, and been divorced from him; if my father was fifteen, and born in 1914, this would date the suicide of his gravedigger-grandfather sometime in 1929. (In my re-imagining of the incident in The Gravedigger’s Daughter the daughter of the suicidal gravedigger is not an adult but a girl, and her father contemplates killing her as well as her mother, before turning the gun on himself. What had not quite happened in actual life, but had been intended, was fulfilled in fiction—in this way, the d
ONLY BELATEDLY DID MY brother and I learn—my parents had had their fiftieth anniversary in 1987, and had not told us!
And, they had not celebrated the anniversary.
We protested: how could you do such a thing? Not celebrate your fiftieth anniversary? Not tell anyone?
My mother only smiled, and gestured toward my father. He was the one, of course, temperamentally disposed never to make too much of things.
(Was my mother’s smile wistful? Would my mother have liked my father to have made more of things than he did, through their long marriage?)
When we were children my brother Robin and I had been astonished by our father’s indifference to gifts. What meant so much to us, as children, meant literally nothing to him; Christmas and birthday presents for our father had to be opened by others (that is, by us) since Daddy thought so little of the ritual.
“Look, Daddy! This is for you”—my brother and I would plead with our father, who might be reading a newspaper, or involved in one or another household chore, and would barely glance at us.
We’d thought our father so strange, not to care—not to care about a present.
For children, even for teenagers, nothing seems quite so exciting as a wrapped present. For days beforehand my brother and I would speculate on the contents of packages beneath our Christmas tree, though our past experiences must surely have curbed our imaginations. But there was our father as indifferent to the excitement of gift-opening as he was to the gifts themselves (invariably shirts, neckties, socks).
Of all writers it is Henry David Thoreau who most speaks to my father’s temperament—Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
And—Simplify, simplify, simplify.
From my father I have inherited my ambivalence about gift-giving. I understand that it is an ancient and revered social ritual and that, in human relations, it is, or should be, a genuine expression of love, affection, admiration, respect; yet, through my life I have rarely felt more anxiety than I feel at the prospect of being given a gift, and only slightly less anxiety at the prospect of giving a gift. For how grateful must one be, for a present which (probably) isn’t at all needed, or wanted; how can one reciprocate a gift, without making a social or personal blunder? Will my gift be wildly inappropriate, too costly/not costly enough? That gift-giving is so crucial to our society, the very wheel driving the capitalist-consumer economy, seems to me, as it seems to my father, unfortunate; the juggernaut of Christmas rolling around each year, overshadowing much else, invariably a season of apprehension and disappointment for many, seems particularly unfortunate. The very nicest “gifts” are those given spontaneously, without ritual or custom tied to a calendar, and these one can truly prize; the others, duly wrapped in expensive paper, part of a seasonal barrage of gifts, are likely to be dubious.