Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  Physicians teach that dashed expectations set in motion four recognizable stages in the process of grief: denial, anger, a search for knowledge, and resolution. If the process is not honestly confronted, then the involved individual or group—or even nation—is often suspended too long at the stages of denial and anger.

  Denial characterized the nation’s attitude toward the Vietnam veteran from the 1960s until the dedication last November of the Vietnam

  —

  To see, not to travel everywhere, but to see and talk, and think, and understand. George and I have spent our lives at it. It will never be understood, we try, but we change, and life changes, it’s a new eye we see with every time we look, and a new aspect of the universe presents itself to our changed eye. But this is our search: to understand as much as we are able of the universe we are part of.

  —

  Michael Hamburger wrote to me, “It is a mistake to carry one’s account too far in time, to the point where memory ceases to act as filter.” I shall have to live to be eighty to write of all the years and their times that I have lived—I plan to live long, and I find that a perspective of time makes it possible to choose from the wealth of memory, that storehouse of what I have thought, what I have seen, and heard. Memory returns this to me, purified by time, made safe for me and those close to me, safe from my sometimes capricious thoughts and judgments. Time and still more time. I was writing when I met George and only began again a few years ago. The long span of years was not silence—it was life.

  When I began to write, a few years ago, I asked George, “Do you remember any of my early poems? I have forgotten them.” George recited two poems to me. The only ones I have from those early times.

  —Jeffrey Yang

  * * *

  * See American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), and American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

  A Note on the Text

  This expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography contains the original text published by Black Sparrow Press in 1978, with a few minor typesetting corrections. Related prose and poetry from Oppen’s archive at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California San Diego has been added in the section “Other Writings.” “Re: Maine” first appeared in George Oppen: Man and Poet, edited by Burton Hatlen (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981). The other prose pieces in this section were transposed from typed, corrected versions in the archive—an indication of Oppen’s possible intention to publish them. Three of these pieces (“Nassau + My Trip to Visit Andy,” “After a Conversation with G.,” and “ ‘Does she think she is a legend?’ ”) first appeared in a slightly different form as part of a folio, “Sketches of Life,” in North Dakota Quarterly 2.3 (Summer 1994–95), edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis from handwritten pieces she found in one of Oppen’s spiral notebooks. The poems first appeared in Poems & Transpositions (New York: The Montemora Foundation, 1981), a supplement to the literary journal Montemora, edited by Eliot Weinberger, and the letterpress chapbook Mother and Daughter and the Sea (Madison, WI: Black Mesa Press, 1981). Oppen’s long journalistic meditation about their trip to Jerusalem and her mini-sketches of sites visited in Greece, among other vignettes and character sketches in her archive, were not included in this volume as they either overlapped with the autobiography, seemed incomplete and rough, or were too far afield from Meaning a Life. A future edition of her writings, as well as of her numerous artworks, awaits an auspicious scholar.

  Thanks to Lynda Claassen, Nina Mamikunian, and Robert Melton at the Mandeville Special Collections Library and Archive for New Poetry for their gracious assistance. Thanks also to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for her generous feedback on the introduction and the selection of archival material, and to Eliot Weinberger for all of his conversations about Oppen’s work over the years. Thanks to Lindsay Garbutt, Don Share, and the rest of the staff at Poetry magazine for publishing an excerpt of the introduction with color plates of some of Mary Oppen’s paintings, etchings, and collages—to my knowledge, the first published folio of Oppen’s visual art. And to Linda Oppen—without her help, patience, and enthusiasm this new edition of her mother’s book would never have been published: Thank you!

  Meaning

  a

  Life

  An Autobiography

  ANNIVERSARY POEM

  ‘the picturesque

  common lot’ the unwarranted light

  Where everyone has been

  The very ground of the path

  And the litter grow ancient

  A shovel’s scratched edge

  So like any other man’s

  We are troubled by incredulity

  We are troubled by scratched things

  Becoming familiar

  Becoming extreme

  Let grief

  Be

  So it be ours

  Nor hide one’s eyes

  As tides drop along the beaches in the thin wash of

  breakers

  And so desert each other

  —lest there be nothing

  The Indian girl walking across the desert, the

  sunfish under the boat

  How shall we say how this happened, these stories, our

  stories

  Scope, mere size, a kind of redemption

  Exposed still and jagged on the San Francisco hills

  Time and depth before us, paradise of the real, we

  know what it is

  To find now depth, not time, since we cannot, but depth

  To come out safe, to end well

  We have begun to say good bye

  To each other

  And cannot say it

  —George Oppen

  A Beginning

  1908–1917

  In our photograph album I have pictures of my two grandmothers, Mary Merchant and Emma La Marr. I did not know my grandfather Colby, so for me it is Mary Merchant who heads my Colby family. Colbys made their way westward from Deer Isle, Maine, and in the Historical Society on Deer Isle I once read an account of Laura Colby, who received a handbill from a passing sailboat with the news that the Americans had won the war against the British. Her sons rowed her the ten miles to Castine to tell the British commander the news.

  Gabriel Colby was a banker in Des Moines, Iowa, at the time of the Civil War, and at his death his wife Mary was left with her fifteen-year-old son, ten daughters, and my father Ora, the younger son. Mary managed the bank and in wartime became prosperous. She survived through wartime speculation but after the war was land-poor. She married off nine of the daughters, but she kept the youngest to care for her and outlive her, still unmarried. Each year my grandmother Colby came to visit us for three days and I felt the tension between her and my mother. When she was with us she became the head of the house.

  My grandfather Thomas Conklin went from upper New York State to join the Union Army. At war’s end he collected his back pay and started walking west. After meeting my grandmother Emma La Marr in Ohio, he walked farther west to Montana, where he took a homestead near Kalispell. Emma went out to Kalispell from Ohio and they lived a frontier life. Grandfather, who played the fiddle, started a singing school, and they sang with a few neighbors who gathered together from their homesteads in the vicinity. My mother’s memory of farm life was that they all worked far too hard. Grandfather went to town only to buy what they could not grow on their own land. My mother wanted a silk dress and a gold ring when she was six years old; “A gold ring won’t keep you warm,” her father told her, “but I will buy you a piece of silk as long as the paring you can peel from an apple.”

  Family farms were large—one hundred forty acres of wheat-land was my g
randfather’s homestead. Anyone could take a homestead grant of land from the government; the only requirement was to improve the land, which meant building a dwelling, living in it and putting the land into production. A photograph pictures my oldest brother, a baby, sitting with my mother’s youngest sisters in front of the family log cabin. My grandparents must have lived long hard years in that cabin in a struggle with the land to make it support them and their fourteen children.

  Mama had the face of her mother and of her Norman ancestors. I have seen my mother’s face in Normandy—the same blue blue eyes, strong hawklike nose and high cheekbones bright with color. Born Alice Carrie Conklin, she had the features of some far-off Viking ancestor. Mama felt free and capable, and the atmosphere in our home was an atmosphere of equal work, but all her life she wanted diamonds, and a fur coat was a symbol to her. It seemed to me that her stories of her childhood were eventful, but she felt deprived. When Mama left the homestead to go back east to a teachers’ college, she worked to support herself in my grandmother Colby’s house, baking bread for the large family. At sixteen she graduated and took her first job near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she lived with a family who had children in the school. She rode her horse side-saddle back and forth each day to the school. When she was eighteen and my father Ora was twenty-one, they married and moved to Big Fork, Montana, where Ora had an appointment as postmaster and Alice taught the first school in the new settlement.

  I think that my father’s older brother had not made room for my father in the family business in Des Moines, or perhaps Ora would not stay in Des Moines; Ora and his brother were not friends. That first year in Montana, Ora had a crippling rheumatism, and he spent long hours in the summer sun, baking out pain. In the newly settled wilderness in Montana my parents’ neighbors were the Indians, and that summer Ora became friends with the Flathead Indian chief, Drag-Your-Tail-Feathers-Over-the-Hill. He would invite the chief to visit and the very next day the chief would be waiting beside the door and they would spend the day together. The chief took from the table any food that was not eaten, for food was traditionally taken home to women and children from any feast.

  (In 1974 I read of Indians forming an organization to save themselves from further degradation, and one of the leaders is a man from Montana named Drag-Your-Tail-Feathers—maybe a grandson or a great-grandson of my father’s friend.)

  At the time my parents went to Big Fork in 1896 the northwest was being settled by waves of immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Land had to be wrested from wilderness; virgin forests could still be found when I was small, although in 1908, when I was born, lumbering was already a big industry. Farmhouses built by these northern people resembled the white-painted, gabled farmhouses left behind in the old country. A farmer was judged by his barn: if the barn was in good repair and was big, cared for and used, if he had hay in the loft and cows in his stalls, he was thought to be a good farmer, though his house might need paint and the porch might be sagging. Wheat, potatoes, and apples were the main crops, and every farmer fattened a few pigs as well and kept at least a few cows to supply butter, milk, cheese, and meat.

  These north European farmers brought their customs with them. Most of them were Lutherans, and they built their small white-steepled church in the town near our house. In back of the church was a long shed for sheltering the horses and buggies that brought the families to church. The influence of New England was manifest in the town—Kalispell had the Chautauqua Circuit, a touring cultural organization that came in summer for a few weeks and again in the winter. My family subscribed, and we all attended lectures, opera, recitations, singing, a strange assortment of entertainment; Protestant and Catholic churches, singing societies, several fraternal societies, and a Carnegie Library also existed in the town. Somewhere near Kalispell a Chinese graveyard with its peaked monuments held offerings of food and flowers on certain days. The graveyard must have dated from the time when Chinese men came over in large numbers to build the Great Northern railway, completed from coast to coast in 1896; the Chinese had been ruthlessly exploited, so stories tell, and the graveyard marked their many deaths.

  When I was due to be born our house was not yet finished, and Papa hurried to get the kitchen ready in time for my birth. Mama and Aunt Dill (who was going to care for me for a few days), Dr. Fisher and Papa were in the new house when I was born in the finished kitchen, and a chestnut tree was planted for me in a corner of our new front yard. The street was new, the town was new except for a small section of Main Street and the depot of the railroad. Kalispell is on a river in the Rocky Mountains, and I think it is still on the main line of the railroad. Highways for automobiles were not continuous in the same condition of roadway until fairly recently, and we traveled, when it was a long distance, by train. Kalispell was isolated; the adults felt a nostalgia for homes back east—New York State, Ohio, or Iowa for my parents and grandparents. For others it was New England, but for many it was Scandinavia or Germany, and for three Chinese it was faraway China—not east but west across the Pacific. From the Orient came nearly all our bowls, baskets, lacquer trays, boxes, and my dolls, especially the small ones I liked to sew for. The one restaurant had a Chinese cook, although the meals that were served were mashed potatoes and a boiled vegetable with meat and gravy. A Chinese man was also the only laundry man in town. Chinese were scattered throughout the northwest, lonely without their women and children.

  The railroad station was the most important place in Kalispell. Men who hung about the livery stable (“hired men” who were hired on farms when they were needed) moved off, when a train was due, toward the station, where baggage cars rumbled on the wooden platform, and sometimes there was a job for one of the jobless men, a trunk to move or a wagon to load. The train arrived in a cloud of steam and screeching brakes, whistling and tooting; everything that came to Kalispell came by that train.

  Once Mama and I traveled from Kalispell to faraway Spokane to visit Mama’s sister. It was night when we arrived in Spokane, and I stepped down from the train to a street lit by electricity. Lights! and signs!—a pig jumped up and down and put a whistle to his snout. I watched entranced, and I’d have stayed watching, but my aunt came toward us and the grown-ups moved toward a streetcar. A streetcar! At each new thing I wanted to stay and ponder and stare. The streetcar lurched and lumped along until we came to a house with cousins I did not know, a household with different smells and, it seemed to me, with no rules for behavior. I was buffeted by the strange cousins; I was disturbed at not being left alone to see or to think or wonder at all that was new. At last I began to cry, and Mama had to cut short her visit. Again we went on the streetcar and saw the dancing pig and the lit streets. We slept at night in a Pullman car in a snug berth made up for us by a Negro porter. All was quiet and the other passengers had disappeared when I looked out from our curtains to see the train aisle transformed into a dark green corridor in which ladder-like steps for climbing into the upper berths had been placed. The curtains swayed with the train’s motion, and the only light was at the end of the car where the porter sat. A little hammock hung from head to foot beside our window for our clothes, and in the corner of the berth was a reading light which I turned on and off. I raised the tightly-drawn window curtain and the mountains flashed by. I had never imagined, when the train come tooting and whistling into Kalispell each day, that inside the train was an enchanted life with a ritual of service, a ritual that makes me sleepy still to recall it.

  Alice in Wonderland seemed to me not only a foreign child, but a child hampered by too many petticoats and interfering adults. I felt not very different from her but much more free. Dorothy of Oz was closer to my feeling for myself. She knew Kansas as I knew Montana, and she met adventures outside her barren home surrounded by her powerful friends and companions just as I felt protected by Papa and Mama and three older brothers.

  At the railway station I used to talk to the engineer and the fireman in their long-bi
lled caps as they leaned from the windows in the engine and coal-tender, waiting for the loading of coal, water, mail, and baggage. Papa was the postmaster in Kalispell, and sometimes I watched the sorting of the mail while townspeople stood around talking and waiting for their newspapers from back east. The arrival of the train was the moment in the day in Kalispell when people met, when they talked and thought about the rest of the world out beyond the mountains.

  Many families in Kalispell kept a horse and many had a cow as well. My family had owned a horse named Maude, but by the time I was born we had an automobile. Papa and several other men in town wanted Fords, but Henry Ford would send cars only to a dealer, so Papa agreed to be the dealer. He ordered the cars, and after they were delivered he gave up the agency. My oldest brother Wendell is still bitter—he says, “Just think what a Ford agency would have meant to us boys.” Wendell spoke of my father in an aggrieved tone, but I don’t think my youngest brother and I ever found any lack in our father. I felt he was there for me, and for me to imagine him to be different would be to imagine the world into which I was born a different world.

  The Ford had straps to the front of the hood to hold the top forward; in fine weather we folded the top behind the back seat. The car was high, very like a horse-drawn carriage, with running-boards serving as steps and with a tool-box fastened to the running-board. Papa made all the repairs himself on the spot usually, wherever we were. On summer evenings Papa would say, “Let’s go for a drive,” and I would run quickly to hunt for his cap which was always mislaid. He drove the Ford (later it was the Maxwell and then the Overland) trundling along at twenty miles an hour, chatting, looking, and stopping if there were new flowers, a pig with new piglets, or a sheep with new lambs. He drove as far as the steel bridge which had replaced the ferry. At home, when we climbed down from the car, I could still smell our horse Maude; she had lived in the stall where we now kept our car.