The Lost Landscape

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The gifts which I give to my parents now are more meaningful to Daddy than the perfunctory gifts of long ago—these are books, records, subscriptions to magazines (Atlantic, Harper’s, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review in which from time to time work of mine might appear); of course, I’ve given my parents copies of each of my books, of which several have been dedicated to them. (Daddy has joked that he’s had to build a special bookcase in their living room, to accommodate my books.) They have an ongoing subscription to Ontario Review.

  It is natural that children mythologize their parents. Even adults mythologize their parents as a way of mythologizing themselves. Some of us make our parents into gods, some make them into demons. After all our parents are giants of the landscape into which we’d been born; we cast our eyes up to them, as we lay in our cribs, or tottered about at their feet.

  The greatest of infantile mysteries must have been the sudden appearance of these giant beings: Mother, Father.

  Equally great, though tinged with dread, their disappearance.

  Yet it seems to me, though my parents are not gods, that they are extraordinary people morally; not in their accomplishments perhaps, but in themselves; in their souls, one might say. It has been a riddle of my own adulthood, as I contemplate my parents: how, given their difficult backgrounds, their impoverished and violence-ridden early lives, did they become the people they are? So many of my writer-friends speak wryly of their parents, or are critical of them, or angry at them; their adult lives are presented as triumphs over the limitations of parents, and rarely as a consequence of their parents. By contrast, I feel utterly sentimental about my parents whose love and support have so informed my life, and who have become, in my adulthood, my friends.

  The writer is driven to commemorate what is past, or passing, if not what’s to come; some of us are fascinated by tracking the generations that have preceded us, that seem to us stronger than our own, and stronger than the generations to follow, because more cruelly tested, more wounded, forced to grow up while still young, and to know of life’s vicissitudes while making no claim, as subsequent generations of Americans have done, of “rights”—“privileges”—“entitlements.”

  Memory is a transcendental function. Its objects may be physical bodies, faces, facial expressions, but these are shot with luminosity like the light in a Caravaggio painting; an interior radiance that transfixes the imagination, signaling that Time has stopped and Eternity prevails. We are not able to perceive “soul” or “spirit” firsthand but this is the phenomenon we summon back by way of an exercise of memory.

  And why the exercise of memory at certain times in our lives is almost too powerful to be endured.

  THE PERFECT MAN OF action is the suicide. These words of William Carlos Williams have long fascinated me for I’d grown up in a world in which men were likely to be men of action rather than of reflection.

  Growing up in the 1950s, I watched boxing matches on television with my father never less than once a week (Fridays), and sometimes twice a week (Wednesdays as well). The Gillette-sponsored fights were the only television programs my father watched including even news programs; my father preferred radio news, or the Buffalo Evening News.

  Why this was, I have no idea. Why my father so disliked any sort of “fiction” on television or in the movies, while maintaining his respect for literature, seems paradoxical; it’s possible that he had inherited his love for books from his mother, though when he was working forty hours a week, and distracted by part-time jobs, he had no time for reading anything but the newspaper.

  Would I have watched boxing matches on television, as a girl, except for my father? Probably not. It’s my theory that women who are emotionally attached to sports have been indoctrinated into such emotions by their fathers, or other men in their lives. Once you enter the particular culture of such a sport you acquire the vision, the sensibility, and the vocabulary for understanding it; you acquire a camaraderie with others who are similarly indoctrinated. You have little patience for those on the outside, who may be repelled by what engages you; you have little interest in “converting” them, and no interest at all in their opinion of you.

  For men of my father’s generation, and of my father’s era generally, the boxing ring exuded a meaning it does not exude today. Boxing was the supreme sport, as it was the sport other sports aspired to be, in its very rawness and (relative) directness. For here was a contest in which men fought one another one-on-one—(that is, not team vs. team)—in a garishly lighted and pitilessly public exposure; here was the very paradigm of life’s justice, or injustice: the elevated boxing ring, not the ballpark or the football field or any sort of tamed “court” or “game” space. You can run but you can’t hide—to paraphrase Joe Louis’s famous remark apropos his brash challenger, light-heavyweight Billy Conn, in 1946.

  Indeed, my father was powerfully drawn to boxing: as a young man he’d sparred with a friend who’d been a semi-professional middleweight in Buffalo, and to this day he marvels at how fast his friend’s hands were, how rapid his “footwork”; how astonished my father had been by being out-matched, so quickly—“In boxing, you either have the talent or you don’t. You can be trained, but that’s all. You have to be born with the talent to be trained.”

  One of the tragedies of my father’s life was that this boxer-friend, as close to him at one time as a brother, had been carelessly mismatched by his manager with a more experienced boxer, who’d knocked him out and badly injured him; he’d retired from boxing in his late twenties, and a few years later, having failed at other prospects, he had killed himself with a rifle.

  Boxing, the cruelest sport. The public sees only the great champions at the apex of their careers but the reality of boxing, the very culture of boxing, is permeated with failure—injuries, dementia, premature death. The boxer who simply prevails is a kind of hero, or would have seemed so in my father’s era; the boxer is one who provides for men both like and unlike himself an emotional link with a (mythic) (masculine) past in which violence and grace, desperation and courage, raw talent and calculation are publicly entwined and communally celebrated. Boxing’s dark fascination has always been as much with failure, and the moral strength to forbear failure, as it has been with success; boxing has always drawn its participants from the “lower depths”—hardly from the safety-concerned middle class. For the ring is a place of exposure as it is of celebration, and its failures and deceits are magnified many times larger than life.

  For years, beginning when I was eleven, my father took me to Golden Gloves matches in Buffalo. No one would have questioned my being in such a hyper-masculine place, as Fred Oates’s daughter; no one would have questioned my father’s judgment in bringing me there to sit amid an audience comprised of virtually all men and boys. As I recall, I was more or less invisible—a slender, unobtrusive girl, and a silent girl, whose memory of the Buffalo arena is of a vast high-ceilinged space punctuated by shouts, screams, howls, catcalls and bells sharply rung as knife blades. Bluish cigarette and cigar smoke wafted everywhere.

  Shouts and screams of triumph as a boxer is declared the winner of his match, and his hand in its big, balloon-like glove is raised aloft by the referee. Howls and catcalls of derision, as a young boxer is knocked to the floor, or tries to clinch with his more aggressive opponent, or scrambles on hands and knees to escape as one might naturally do, in instinctive panic.

  Seeing such displays of aggression suggests a violation of taboo, thus the frisson of boxing, not so evident when seen on television as when it is seen “live” and there is no running verbal commentary to defuse and explain it; there is no TV screen to frame it, like a work of art or theater. In the arena, a boxing match is a raw and pitiless spectacle from which you can’t hide your eyes—for whether you look or not, the spectacle is occurring before you.

  My father subscribed to The Ring—“The Bible of Boxing”—a magazine absorbed in the history of its subject. (For boxing, far more obsessively than
most sports, is not only about itself but about its history.) In those years—roughly, 1940s through the early 1960s—the names of boxers were household names, each evoking a distinct and colorful personality: Rocky Marciano, Jersey Joe Walcott, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Carmen Basilio, Kid Gavilan, Rocky Graliano, Jake LaMotta, Bobo Olson, Tony DeMarco, Rocky Castellani, Roland LaStarza. Mention Joey Maxim and my father will react at once with contempt—for the mere name Joey Maxim summons up, for my father, memories of questionable decisions by referees and judges, rumors of fixed fights, the mob-controlled championship fights that became routine in the early 1950s (portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s great boxing film Raging Bull).

  Once, in fall 1952, I stayed home from a junior high school dance on a Friday night to watch, with my father, Rocky Marciano win the world heavyweight championship from Jersey Joe Walcott in a bout televised from Philadelphia. No dance could have been so thrilling—no occasion with classmates so profound as this with my father. I remember how respectful my father was of Walcott, and how impressed by Marciano—that exemplum of the triumph of sheer brute will in the face of an opponent’s superior skill, intelligence, and experience.

  Of this, I could not have spoken to my school friends. I could not have explained to anyone. Nor did my father speak so abstractly. That the Friday night fights illuminated dark, repressed, systematically denied aspects of our lives and by extension the communal life of America at that time might have been felt by us, but it could not have been articulated by either of us.

  Who could have predicted, when Rocky Marciano won the heavyweight title in 1952, that he would be the last white (American) boxer to win this title; that, after Marciano’s retirement in 1956, he would be most remembered for having been the single untied and undefeated champion in heavyweight history, and not for having been a great champion. By the time of Marciano’s death, in the crash of a small, private plane in 1969, his era had long been over; the (predominantly white) boxing world that had so mesmerized my father and his friends had metamorphosed into something new and rich and strange and surely intimidating—the era of Muhammad Ali.

  Since retiring from Harrison’s my father has begun taking adult education courses at the University of Buffalo. He has begun taking piano lessons. In the evenings he reads, or practices piano. It is a new, rejuvenated life in which, as he says, he has no time for TV boxing.

  FROM A LETTER OF my father’s dated September 8, 1988.

  Your postcard asking about my history came the day after I phoned. I don’t quite know how to give you this information because I have no school records like you and Fred—all I can do is guess.

  Born in Lockport 3/30/14. Parents separated when I was 2 or 3. Started violin lessons in sixth grade (school instruction) then began private lessons with money earned peddling papers. My mother bought my violin for me otherwise I would have had to quit because the one I used belonged to the school. I played in the high school symphony orchestra as a freshman. My mechanical drawing teacher got me a job with Schine theaters in Lockport in the sign shop working after school. At summer vacation I worked full-time at the job and quit school in my second year. Worked at the theater until I was about 17 when the sign shop closed and I went into production advertising.

  Got a job in a commercial sign shop when I was 18 and bought a car. After about 4 years of this work got a job at Harrison Radiator in the punch press department and, thinking I had a steady job, learned to fly, got married, then found myself laid off for extended periods so I had to resume at the sign shop until the War began when I was able to get transferred into the engineering tool room and learned the tool and die-making technique, later on was able, after going to night school to learn trig and related subjects, started tool and die design. At about 50 years of age I took piano lessons for about four years at which time I was operated on to remove herniated disc material and was out of commission for about six months then worked about 10 more years and retired. Took a course in stained glass, class in painting, four years ago started classes in English & American literature as well as music at SUNY (State University of New York, Buffalo) which I hope to continue for a few more years.

  Love

  Dad

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER I was born in June 1938 my twenty-four-year-old father reported to work at Harrison Radiator and was told that there was no work, the entire press room was laid off “indefinitely” . . . This was before the factory was unionized and my father became a member of the UAW (United Auto Workers) in the early 1940s.

  And so, we ask Daddy, what did you do? How did you feel?

  And Daddy looks at us with an expression of mild incredulity mingled with pity for our stupidity as if to say Is that a serious question? How do you think a young husband and father would feel, having to come home early to his wife and tell her he has been laid off “indefinitely”?—but he says only, “Yes. It was hard.”

  IT IS FASCINATING TO me, to be told that my grandmother, who’d had so little money as a young, single mother, had somehow pur chased a violin for my father—the beautiful violin my father still owns, though he has not tried to play it in decades.

  A piano is much easier, my father says. You don’t have to create notes, the notes are there in the keyboard, to be played.

  For as long as I could remember there was an upright piano in a corner of our living room in the farmhouse in Millersport, which my father played, or played at, virtually every night. Playing piano was a way of relaxing after hours of work, I suppose. Playing piano was a way of escaping into silence when a man did not wish to talk.

  My piano lessons, paid for by my grandmother, began when I was ten and ended when I was sixteen. Like my father, but with more zeal and discipline than my father, since I was a “student,” I sat at this piano rarely less than once a day, often two or three times a day, practicing scales, lessons. What sharp, visceral memories are contained in my fingertips, triggered by notes, sound, rhythm—it is a fraught exercise for me to approach any piano, and depress any chord no matter how innocuous.

  For a musical instrument—piano, violin—inhabits a complex sort of space: it is both an ordinary three-dimensional object and an extraordinary object, a portal to another world; it exists as a physical entity solely so that the physical can be transcended. And so my father’s old upright piano in the long-vanished living room in Millersport inhabits its own luminous space in my memory, as in this memoir.

  For most of his life Fred Oates has played piano. He has loved to play piano. He plays classical music of a popular sort—“The Erl-King,” “Für Elise,” Traümerei, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (transcribed for piano), Moonlight Sonata—and he plays American popular music—“Deep Purple,” “St. James Infirmary,” “As Time Goes By,” “Night and Day,” “Hong Kong Blues,” “Frankie and Johnnie,” “Blue Moon,” “Melancholy Baby,” “September Song,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”; he plays Scott Joplin, jazz, “swing.” He can sight-read music, to a certain degree of difficulty, and he can “play by ear” and improvise, impressively. Clearly I have inherited from my father a temperament that might be called “musical”—which isn’t the same as having inherited talent.

  Do you listen to music while you write?—this curious question is often asked of writers.

  The more attentive you are to music, the more distracted you are by hearing music while you try to work. For music is an exquisite art, not white noise.

  It must be a fairly modern custom, to ubiquitously “pipe in” music in public places. When did this custom begin, and how will it end? Can it end? There is something offensive in having to listen to music, particularly to “serious” music, as if it were but background noise, or a film score; for music exists in and of itself, and not as an accompaniment to anything else.

  Music is the supreme solace, because it is so much more. It is the spiritual counterpoint to the world’s cacophony, essential as a heartbeat.

  When I am alone in any private place that is quiet I have only to sh
ut my eyes and I can hear Daddy playing the old upright in our living room in Millersport. In the memory I am sitting beside Daddy on the piano bench as Daddy sings one of his favorite songs—“Melancholy Baby,” “Blue Moon,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.”

  NOW IT IS NOVEMBER 1988. And I am listening to my father playing piano in a distant room in our house—now, Erik Satie’s elegant Gnossiennes.

  (This isn’t a piano composition from the old days of Millersport, but a piano piece which I play myself, sometimes—Daddy has found the sheet music on the piano.)

  When I think of my parents, I think of Colette’s remark—Happiness is a kind of genius. How true this is! And yet, where genius is concerned, we become speechless, inadequate; we have nothing to say, for we are not able to understand what genius is.

  In the case of Fred and Carolina Oates, no one would claim “genius” for them but only rather a kind of wisdom, as much acquired as instinctive. The quality of personality they embody, their magnanimity of spirit, the ways in which they enhance the lives of others around them—how oddly matched it is, with their origins and with the harsh and unsentimental world in which they were born.