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.
Read more...
