A Plea for Eros (4 page)

My first real memory takes place in a bathroom. I remember the tile floor, which is pale, but I can’t give it a color. I am walking through the door toward my mother, who is in the bath. I can see the bubbles. I know it’s a real memory and not a false one taken from photographs or stories because there are no pictures of that bathroom and because the proportions of the bathtub and toilet correspond to the height of a small person. The bubbles fascinate me, and the presence of my mother fills me with strong, simple pleasure. My mother, who hasn’t spent much time in bubble baths during the course of her life, has always been somewhat dubious about this memory. But within this isolated fragment I see the path of my walk—the hallway, the small living area, the door to the kitchen; and when I described the walk to my mother, she confirmed that the rooms correspond to the graduate-student barracks near the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was three.

I have memories of that first trip to Norway, too. The most striking is one of light and color. I am sitting outside at a table with my sister and my mother and my aunt. My cousins were probably there as well, but I have no memory of them. The sunshine is so brilliant I have to squint. We are close to water. I have no idea whether it was a fjord near Bergen or the ocean off Mandal. It’s water and it’s blue. It’s probably the fjord, because I do not remember vastness or a beach but trees and rocks. The table is white, and on the table are glasses of shining soda pop—yellow and red. Those glasses of
brus
(the Norwegian word for soda pop, a word I never forgot) delight and fascinate me. I am quite sure that I’d never seen red soda before, and the memory is so powerful, I must have felt I was in the presence of a Norwegian miracle. That bottle of red
brus
on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible
there.
It may have been in part responsible for the question I asked my mother when I was five or six: “Why is everything better in Norway?” I don’t remember asking the question, but my mother assures me I was tactless enough to ask it. My poor mother decided that she had framed her emigration in the wrong light and vowed to be more careful about her comparisons between the two countries in the future.

Early memories are isolated bits of experience remembered for reasons that are often difficult to articulate; and because they have no greater narrative in which they can be framed, they float. At the same time, they may have more purity than later memories, for that very reason. When dailiness enters memory, repetition fixes places in the mind, but it also burdens them with a wealth of experience that is often difficult to untangle. For example, I remember Longfellow School, where I attended grade school, very well. I can see its hallways and connect one to another. I can even see the bathroom outside my third-grade class. I remember it as gray. It may have been gray, but it could be that I colored it in memory. I have given the interior of that building a single color that is also emotional: gray. Although I was always excited to begin school in the fall (a season separated from the spring before by years of summer), and although I loved walking out to the school bus with my three sisters, all of us wearing the identical new dresses my mother had sewn for us, my memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, brings on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don’t know. I never would have said I didn’t like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don’t alter my memory of that place. There’s something unpleasant about saying that a gut response can be a lie, but I think it’s possible. Unlike the intricacy of the physical world, feelings are generally more crude than language—guilt, shame, being hurt by another person feel remarkably alike in the body. Reason tells me that my early experiences in that school were a complex mixture of pain, pleasure, and boredom, but whenever I drive past it or think about it, the building itself is wrapped in gloom.

Many years later, I had a similar experience but in reverse. From 1978 through 1986, I was a graduate student at Columbia, but by 1981 I had met my future husband and moved first to SoHo, in downtown Manhattan, and then to Brooklyn. It is true that those first couple of years, when I was living near Columbia, I was very poor. It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I don’t even wish now that I had had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant
no.
After I left that neighborhood, however, I rarely returned to it. I saw my dissertation adviser three times in three years and then defended on a clear spring day in 1986. After that, I disappeared for good. Several years later, I returned, because my husband, Paul Auster, had been asked to give a talk at the Maison Française. Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn’t happy here. Then, after the reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there—in the library. Butler is a good library, one of the best. It has some handsome rooms, but its stacks are inhospitable and dark. One spring while I was a student, all the women were given whistles before they entered the stacks, because an exhibitionist had been prowling the badly lit corridors, and we were told to pucker up and blow if there was any trouble. Again, I don’t fully understand my emotional response to that library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being. I read Sigmund Freud in that library and Émile Ben-veniste and Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin and was forever changed by them, but I also sweated out bad papers and was bored and troubled and irritated there. My mind wandered from the work at hand and strayed to food or clothes I couldn’t afford or to the attractive arms and shoulders of some young man sitting at the far end of the table. So what does it mean that the sight of Butler Library turned me into a quivering heap of sentimental mush? It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified—that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

At the same time, I’m fully aware that libraries occupy a particular place in my life, and my sudden burst of feeling for Butler isn’t related only to my life as a graduate student. My father took me and my sisters into the dim, dusty stacks on the seventh floor of Rolvaag Library at St. Olaf, where he worked for the historical association. To get there, we walked into an old elevator with a bright red door and a grate that folded and unfolded with lots of creaking and banging. I was already a heroine then, Alice or Pollyanna or a generic princess from a fairy tale—and the trip into that landscape of book spines and bad light made me feel like a person in a story on some curious adventure. It may be that I link every library to that first one—to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father’s desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I’ve always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many. When her children were older, my mother worked part-time in the St. Olaf library, too. She was employed there when I was a student. I didn’t sleep in Rolvaag Library, but most of my waking hours were spent in a carrel there, and sometimes she would come to see me. I would feel her hands on my shoulders and turn my head, knowing I was going to see my mother. Years before she found herself filing periodicals in that library, she found books for me. It was my Norwegian mother, not my American father, who introduced me to the English poems and novels that affected me most when I was young. She gave me Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience
when I was eleven. I didn’t understand those poems, but they fascinated me as much as
Alice in Wonderland
had, and I read them again and again with mingled horror and pleasure. She gave me Emily Dickinson, too, around the same time, a tiny green edition of famous poems, and I would repeat those poems to myself in a trance. They were secrets to me, strange and private. I think it was the sound of those poems that I loved. I chewed on Blake’s and Dickinson’s words like food. I ate them, even when their meanings eluded me.

It was my mother who sent me off to the library for
David Copperfield
and
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
when I was thirteen, and it’s fair to say that to this day I have not recovered from a single one of those novels. That was the summer of 1968, and my family was in Iceland. I cannot think of Reykjavik without the thought that I was David and Jane and Catherine there in that house, where I found it hard to sleep, because the sun never set. I would go to the window and lift the shade in the bedroom and look out into the eerie light that fell over the roofs, not daylight at all, some other light I had never seen before and have never seen since. The otherworldly landscape of Iceland has come to mean story for me. My father took us out into the countryside to the places where the sagas are said to have taken place. The sagas are fiction, but their settings are geographically exact. My father stopped the Volkswagen Bug we had rented; and after all six of us had piled out of that tiny car, and we stood on that treeless ground with its black lava rock and smoking geysers and green lichen, my father showed us where Snorre died. “The axe fell on him here!” And when my father said it, I saw the blood running on the ground. When he wasn’t finding the sites where the heroes had wandered, my father was in the library reading about them. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphoses through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Seventy-six years after Uncle David walked off the ship at Ellis Island, I arrived at the airport in New York City. It was early September 1978.1 didn’t know a living soul in the place. My suitcase was heavy, and nobody helped me carry it, something unheard of in Minneapolis. But frankly, even this indifference from New Yorkers didn’t bother me. I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn’t like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota. This was my guiding fiction, and I was determined to make good on it. I had a tiny room in International House, on West 123rd Street at Harlem’s border. My first three days were spent rereading
Crime and Punishment
in a state that closely resembled fever. I couldn’t sleep, because the noise from traffic, sirens, garbage trucks, and exuberant pedestrians outside my window kept me wide awake all night. I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly
here
in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it—the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between
there
and
here.
I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved—romantic, urbane, intellectual. Looking back on that moment, I believe I was saved from disappointment by the nature of my “great expectations.” I honestly wasn’t burdened with conventional notions of finding security or happiness. At that time of my life, even when I was “happy,” it wasn’t because I expected it. That was for characters less romantic than myself. I didn’t expect to be rich, well fed, and kindly treated by all. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to embrace whatever the city held for me, and if this meant a few emotional bruises, even a couple of shocks, if it meant not eating too well or too often, if it meant a whole slew of awful jobs, so be it.

It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all. Like all the places where I’ve actually lived, New York City is much more than a “context” or “setting” for me. Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before. Although I had always felt at home with my parents and sisters, I was never really comfortable with my peers. By the time I found myself in college, my feeling that I was not inside but outside had intensified. There’s no question that I cultivated this to some degree, that I prided myself on my difference, but I confess it hurt and surprised me to be regarded as “strange.” I had friends I loved and teachers I loved, but rumors in which I was variously characterized as wild, monkishly studious, or just plain weird haunted my career as a college student. I recall my father telling me with a smile that one of his students had described me as “very unique.” In New York, this all but ended. Whatever exoticism I may have possessed came from my midwestern sincerity and lack of worldly sophistication. Transformations of the self are related to
where
you are, and identity
is
dependent on others. In Minnesota, I felt embattled. I rebelled against a culture that touted “niceness” above truth, that wallowed in an idea of “equality” that had come to mean “sameness” and “intolerance”—not of the sick, dying, ugly, or handicapped but of those who distinguished themselves by talent or beauty or intelligence. The “hoity-toity” were really batted around out there. Pretension wasn’t suffered for an instant, and for a girl who walked around dreaming she was a combination of George Eliot and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man,
life could be hard. In Minnesota, I lusted after every quality that was in short supply—artifice, irony, flamboyant theatricality, fierce intellectual debate, and brilliantly painted lips.