The Ever-Present Past: E.B. White and Terrence des Pres

Today my creative nonfiction students at the University of Pennsylvania shifted my mood, as they do. Their tough-tender souls, their velocity of ideas, their endearing capacity for listening, their well-wrought, thoroughly considered words. Their nouns and verbs outpacing their adjectives and adverbs. Their piano melodies. These young people respect the work and one another; that's transparent. They put their souls into their words; I cheer them on. They do unexpected things elaborately well without ever getting precious in the process. 

We're talking about time in memoir this semester. Our conversation today turned to the ways that E.B. White, in his classic "Once More to the Lake," taps eternal weather and landscape to freeze and elongate the past, to windmill the present, to take us (tragically, beautifully) to a time that isn't but (in memory) is.

I promised the students that I would share this essay, which I created for my memoir video series, when I got home. So here I am, home, and here this is, for any of you who are reminiscing today, for any of you in a mood for words.

On Valentine's Day, the gift of memoir

EPISODE 6: The Ever-Present Past

(excerpted from my memoir video series)

E.B. White, “Once More to the Lake,” Essays of E.B. White

Terrence des Pres, “Memory of Boyhood,” Writing into the World

In his beloved essay “Once More to the Lake,” first published in Harper’s magazine in 1941, E.B. White recreates summers once spent as a boy near a lake by returning to the same terrain with his son.

At first the trip is speculation, a question White has about “how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot—the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps.”

But once arrived, White settles in and discovers that the past is sensationally near. The past can be seen, smelled, touched. It is the first morning. White is lying in bed, “smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat.” He begins “to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father.”

It’s a tantalizing thought. A pleasant confusion. And now a vague, lovely timelessness sets in, only sometimes disturbed, say, by a noticeable change in the tracks of a road and the “unfamiliar, nervous sound of the outboard motor.” And yet, White allows the clocks to stand still, the illusion to hold, the dizziness to set in when, as he fishes with his son, he doesn’t “know which rod I was at the end of.”

“Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end….,” White writes. Persuasively.

But how long can we stop the clocks when we are living? How long can we pretend now is then? How long can we carry the comforting illusions in our head, the gentle perturbations? What brings us back to our own selves, our aging skins? For White it is a thunderstorm—a revival of familiar weather, everything the same about it, at that same lake, boyhood/manhood indivisible—White’s son takes his wet trunks from the line and pulls “around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment” and it is then, only then, that the years pass quickly in White’s fugue state, when he is reminded that he is a father now, that he is mortal, that time has passed, that time is always passing. As his son buckles the belt, White writes, “suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

The illusion has been pleasing. White’s illusion has, over the course of those brief pages, been our own. He has made time stand still by professing persuasive confusion about what time is, about who we are, about age itself, about the tremors of youth. He has made us young again by returning us to a younger version of himself. We have been grateful. And we have been shocked, with him, by a reminder of this: Time does not stop.

In the very final pages of Terrence des Pres’s collection of essays Writing into the World, time is held in the balance once more, but by a very different strategy on the page. Here, in “Memory of Boyhood,” a reflection on des Pres’s fishing days as a child in Missouri first published in Sports Illustrated in 1973, des Pres begins by acknowledging that he is not the boy he once was. “I no longer fish,” he writes, “and the boy who did is twenty years into the past.”

And yet, des Pres says, “memories of that time come constantly to mind. They return to me, or I to them, as if they were my source, a keel of sanity in a world more gnarled and rotted than—at a right-angle bend in the river—the gigantic pile of driftwood and tree trunks we used to call Snake City.”

Boyhood. Summertime. Water. Fish. Des Pres, like White in “Once More,” is recreated, renewed by the primeval. He is washed back into time. He sees, as he travels on, “a boy heading down to the river,” where, “with cane pole and worms” he would catch his fish.

That boy heading down to the river is now a third-person character. He is becoming nearly fictive. He is a dream sustained by memory. He is not des Pres, but he could not exist without des Pres. He is true, because he was. He is false, because he is no more.

We walk with him. Through the haze, toward the banks and fish, to the hours most loved: “He loved best to take his fly rod—a ferruled cane pole to which he’d wired eyes and a reel—and start for the river at dawn. To enter the wet gray stillness of day before sunrise.”

We remain within this ineluctable fiction, this timeless glory, until des Pres snaps his authorial fingers and brings us back to now. “The boy, of course, is myself,” he writes, “a self more vital, compact, pure, like wood within the inmost ring of a tree whose life has reached to many rings.”

The story continues, but now the third person is left behind in favor of first person. We learn more and more about the fishing of des Pres’s youth; the fishing becomes more treacherous, more gory, even brutal. Des Pres remarks on the savagery. He shows it to us. He suggests that “Joy was what counted, the rush of deep delight that came, I think, from rites that for a million years kept men living and in touch with awe.” He ends with this:

“That was the blessing of boyhood. It depended on a way of life now largely vanished and to which in any case I cannot return. Perhaps that is why I no longer fish. Except in memory, a grace that is lost stays lost.”

Des Pres, unlike White, will not return to those Missouri banks. He will see himself through the veil of a third-person telling. He will yearn for the self “more vital, compact, pure, like wood within the inmost ring of a tree.”

White and des Pres, in very different ways, have returned us to childhood. White by physically returning to the site of his boyhood and by creating an elastic envelope of time in which a father is a son, or a son is a father. Des Pres by concentrating his boyhood, by wringing it free of all but the sweet myth, by making himself a known fiction, by preserving the memory by submitting to the possibility that a grace that is lost stays lost. Neither writer pokes holes through the piece with dialogue. Both stay rooted in the primeval—the haze and the sun, the water and the fish.

All of which returns me to you: What are the components of your elemental past? What is your sun and your haze? Do you believe in the elasticity of time? If you were to write of your most primeval self, who would that self be? The third person girl you can just barely see through the neural fog? Or the little boy who sits beside you while you’re listening to me?

Find a quiet place. Grab a keyboard or a pen. Take yourself back to another time and write the elemental you.

Write it in past tense. Write it in present. Write it in first person. Write it in second or third.

Somewhere in there is the story you must tell.

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Writing into the World

"There are few excitements as fine as those first walks at dawn after a night spent writing.  I remember them still, the filmy lights and chilly smells, the visionary dignity of empty streets, the uproarious feuding of the birds—and further off the diesel pounding (which seemed the rivers slow deep heart) of barges pushing upstream through the Mississippi’s lifting mist.  The work of those nightlong sessions is now lost, thank goodness, but the excitement remains.  There is this thing about writing, any kind of writing, which makes the hardship and waiting small cost.  I mean the perpetual sense of promise, of what remains—everything!—to be done." 

Terrence Des Pres, Writing into the World

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What makes for a memorable literary profile?

In class today we'll be reviewing the possibilities inherent in the first-person literary profile.  How, for example, does James Baldwin both summon his father and reveal his own soul in "Notes of a Native Son"?  He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now mine.  

How much knowing lies behind Frederick Busch's words, about Terrence des Pres:  He had found what most writers searched for, consciously or otherwise, all their working lives: the subject that was metaphor for the interior strife that drove them to be writers. 

And what is Annie Dillard up to with "The Stunt Pilot"?  How is it that she reveals herself, even when her seeming purpose is to help us see this plane and its magic-making driver?  The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended. Reluctantly, I started paying attention.   Rahm drew high above the world an inexhaustibly glorious line; it piled over our heads in loops and arabesques.  It was like a Saul Steinberg fantasy; the plane was the pen.  Like Steinberg's contracting and billowing pen line, the line Rahm spun moved to form new, punning shapes from the edges of the old.  Like a Klee line, it smattered the sky with landscapes and systems. 

We'll talk about all this and more, then get back to the business of critiquing student memoirs.

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Carolyn Forche: a poet still vested

Years ago, outside of Prague, I spent an afternoon with Carolyn Forche—a train ride away from the city where she had read, the night before, from one of my favorite poems ever written, a haunt of a poem in honor of Terrence des Pres.  I think her often—of her and the stories she told to those who had gathered there, in a Czech backyard.  Grandmother stories.  Oven stories.  Stories of war.

A few weeks ago, I was stopped by these lines in a new Carolyn Forche poem called "The Lightkeeper," which appears in full in the May 3rd issue of The New Yorker.

Forche remains a poet vested with power:

... You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid.  Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes.  Go toward the light always, be without ships.

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English 145 (9): Stationing the Mind, Readying the Heart

We saved Terrence Des Pres for last in English 145—"Writing into the World" and "Accident and its Scene: Reflections on the Death of John Gardner." He had so much to teach us, Des Pres. So much integrity as a scholar and witness. So much urgency toward imagining the truth:

"Transcendence, art for art's sake, writing for the ages—these take care of themselves. Good writing will always survive. Meanwhile, the prose of witness responds to the world, finds its work in the occasions that call it forth. Its method is exact attention to the actual. It depends on respectful reading of detail; on imagination making connections and seeing what's there. It also depends upon art—right words to station the mind and hold the heart ready."

One reads Des Pres's reflections on John Gardner's ultimately inexplicable early death with a heart made heavy with the knowledge of Des Pres's own far-too-soon, and essentially unreadable, passing. One leans toward the faith Des Pres held in this strange and beautiful thing we writers do: "Few of us believe anymore that through art our sins shall be forgiven us, but perhaps it's not too much to think that through art a state of provisional grace can be gained, a kind of redemption renewed daily in the practice of one's craft." One reads "Ourselves or Nothing," the poem Carolyn Forche wrote to honor Des Pres, and wishes, fervently, that Des Pres were still among us.

All of this we do—we did yesterday—in English 145, on a rainy day, in a quiet room, against the backdrop of the very real and pressing news of the too-soon passing of a student on campus just the day before. How did the end come early to this student? Why? How is one to speak of it? To whom does such sadness belong?

Knowing, in the end, isn't everything. Wanting to know matters more. I love my students for wanting to know. For being who they are. Right now.

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Black Market, Cold War/Paul Steege: A Book Review

Paul Steege is a friend. A Princeton graduate who reminds me, often, of my own brother, another Princeton alum. A broad-thinking, socially responsible, inventive soul with whom I loved serving on our church outreach committee. An associate professor of history at Villanova University, who was in attendance this past Friday evening at a dinner honoring the Distinguished Historians Lecture Series my father has bestowed there in memory of my mother. A man with whom I can talk at length about readerly/writerly things.

Paul Steege is all of that (oh, yes, and also: Paul played goalie for Princeton's soccer team), and he is as well the author of Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949, a book that I have just this morning finished reading. I knew Paul through some of the years that he spent working on this book—would see him at the local coffee shop pounding away on his laptop. We'd talk about its contents, but not until I read would I actually see just how smart Paul is on the page, how evocatively he brings to life the black market terrors, compromises, and small, lit-up salvations of a Berlin ransacked by divisions and impossible politics. This book is fresh; the past is parsed. What happened is here, but more to the point is how Paul discovers, for us, what the past means, how he challenges "all ordinary people," in his words, "to consider their complicty in the making of their worlds, but also their potential to transform them."

The years 1946-1949 were brutal and harrowing in Berlin: buildings were shorn, winters were fierce, women were so frequently raped that rape became the commonplace of conversation, and even for the most ethical-minded, the black market was the essential salve. Within this unambiguous context of suffering, there were, still, grace notes of humanity—gestures Paul sets aside with Terrence des Pres-like care. This one, from Paul's book, will touch any reader deeply:

Even in the midst of the extreme cold, Berliners sought out opportunities to reassert their humanity and do more than just survive. Ruth Andreas-Freidrich described sitting in an apartment with friends bundled up in hats and coats and listening to one of them recite poems by Goethe. 'And when you think about it, they seem even more beautiful at twenty degrees below zero, without electricity or coal.'

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