As I now see it, my memoir is based on growing up in the South. First of all, what that might do to you. But secondly - and way under that - what it might, in the long run, do for you. What kind of feminist can an inbred Southerner be, wherever she ends up living? Isn't that learned restraint, ingrained politeness, understatedness and all that contradictory to any outspokenness such as feminism requires?

Carolyn and I discussed this, sometimes straight on and sometimes glancingly, in our weekly walks over the many years in which I was writing To The Boathouse. She wanted very much to have our picture together in it, and there it is. The two-of-us-plus-dog picture, which serves as a background for an announcement of this conference, was taken by Jim, and I love it dearly.

That's not the one in here. The one in here is one where we're both doing things at the MLA, and that's a choice of the editors. In a sense, anything I say now or read now has to do with that background - the background of walking with Carolyn in the park, and talking about the things we talked about. So I dedicate this talk to her, naturally.

Our discussions often turned around the topic of Southern-ness. As for what the South, or any South or my South, might have done or keep on doing for you, the main thing is probably that very contradiction itself - between the way you were brought up and the way you have, then, to bring yourself up.

Ironically, and just as precisely, that's what can't be put into words. It can't be spoken and named, only written. Some things I couldn't write either. For instance, what Carolyn always wanted me to do - she always wanted me to talk about class difference in the South. I can't. Not that I wouldn't, but I couldn't.

What I could tell most efficaciously concerns my klutziness, if I may borrow that term from my New York friends. Carolyn loved best my weekly stories of my mishaps and forgetfulness and awkwardness - all odd tales of the oddnesses in my disorganized living, so different from hers.

Perhaps I overstated those tales for her. Perhaps I overlived that part of my living for her. I would greet her expectant face every week with some new story of my awkwardness. Actually, a great part of my memoir, which you will hear a little of, is about that: Losing my place, my slides, my credit cards, my identity. Losing my text somewhere in Australia. Losing my way somewhere in the Saskatoon snow. Missing the plane to Winnipeg or to Paris. That sort of thing.

Accidents, incidents - it's not anything deep or true; not at all like the basis of my beingness, which is a kind of drivenness. I always want to be somewhere else. I always want to write somewhere else. I want to do something, always, that I haven't done - choose a new subject, be a new subject. I've always called that dilettantism, but I've been told to say it's just energy. (laughter)

I still think it's dilettantism. That's always been my truest place. Memoirs want to be about truth, don't they? Even as we arrive at that through such peculiar means, including fiction. So I had to write about love and betrayal on both sides of a very long marriage. How do you do that without rage or bitterness or self-indulgence?

I gave this my best shot and I hope it comes over, despite all the fictionalizing of fact or embroidery of memory or undone overstatement of incidents and accidents and whatever else. After the fact, I and many of us tend to call it history.

Sometimes when I was asked to write a chapter for a book - and this seems to happen all the time; the latest one is called Living With a Writer - I never knew whether that meant me or the man I was married to. And when I asked, the editor simply said, either one. (laughter)

It was a problem. I've included the names, but they're fictionalized. However, in my memoir, as I was asked to do, I've told the real names.

That's much more complicated, calling out those intense persons by their names. Finally, a memoir inspired by the values of feminism must be about the survival of whatever you value about yourself, and how that works when things about you seem to conspire against that so mightily.

It must be about finding your voice, whether that voice sounds feminist or not - whatever you feel that means in your case. And I know that I sound very different from a lot of feminists, and Carolyn certainly thought so.

My suspicion is that we, the writers, may sometimes not know how we sound. For me, much of my writing and speaking and living have their not-always-remembered in origin and their ongoing being through my grandmother - a painter impassioned by her work. She'd studied in Bremen, where she frequented the painters and the poet Rilke.

And then she returned to live out a gracious and relentlessly social Southern life with her family in North Carolina. A fate - I won't say worse than death, but I'm not living there, as you may have noticed. (laughter)

How ever did she do that? Never letting down either work which informed everything, or that Southern-ness which informed her? How can I do that in my work and life? Finding your brush as a painter and your voice as a writer are not so distinct. It's still a matter of determinedness, passion and energy. All that, she had.

In the long run, my memoir is about trying to find, after everything and during everything, a place where I can unembarrassedly think and write and be me. To The Boathouse is about a place in Central Park, away and yet nearby. It was enabling because it had to be chosen.

It had to be where I wasn't normally. In short, a Parisian cafe in New York. We all remember the angel in the house, and she's an object of fear no longer for any of us. In a way, I found my writing, not softened by politeness, on the one hand or rushed by my normal, hurried impatience, on the other.

My memoir is or wants to be about the vibrancy of voice that gives you a place and a home to speak from. Here's what I most hope for: vibrancy, curiosity, and adventuresomeness.

So, among these adventures I will read to you snippets from my memoir, and I hope that they make some sense together. And they made some sense for me only after I saw it in book form.

It begins with an anecdote - I went on my junior year to France. Then we all got the photograph of ourselves in France. This was like two years ago, and I'm not in it. That's where it begins:

There were all my classmates, all smiling, looking very 1950s. I couldn't find myself in the group: I was just not there with the others. That's what it often felt like growing up and then afterward, not being wherever I was. I would never have expected to see so clear a picture of my absence. (xi)

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Our town looked, so long ago, like a lot of towns in North Carolina, I expect. It was quiet and you could usually make time for what you wanted to do. I remember most, growing up in an outlying part called Oleander, how my sister, Peg, and I would make time for going down to the river. It wasn't much of a river, really, sort of a creek, with insects flitting back and forth. But we called it "the river."

Bright green wings I remember, and the water a muddy brown. And vines growing up along the trees and winding down again in a dark tangle. You would take hold of the one that seemed the right length for that particular day, swing out on it way out over the water, and drop down on the other side. Right before you would grab it, you would get a terror in your knees, and worse right before dropping. I never got over it. What Peg felt, I don't know. I couldn't seem to ask her about it. Right now, I can feel that swoop in the pit of my stomach.

The trees crowded close together by the creek to make a perfect place for secrets, away from the light, twisting and murky. Sometimes there were several of us over by the vines, but I liked best being there just with Peg. We had something special between us: hard to say what. Mother used to ask me about it; Father never did. When we'd had enough swinging, we'd go behind the vines, and smoke a bit of rabbit tobacco in the circle of the bamboo grove, hidden away. That was where Peg told me about life. I surely wasn't going to ask our parents about anything. It wasn't actually a family in which you wanted to ask a lot. Whatever kept us quiet, it had gotten all tangled up, worse than the vines. You couldn't see the bottom or where it started, or how to untangle it. (2)

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Mother wore flat shoes, so that she would not tower over Father, which she did in any case. His short stature had saved him once, she told us, when an enemy bullet had left a deep mark in the top of his pilot's helmet. He had been shot down several times, but never talked about it. Or much of anything else that seemed important to me.

Father never spoke to us about his past, although we would have liked him to. We were not supposed to ask about that or indeed anything at all. We weren't told that, I think, but we just knew.

In a typical dinner table scene Peg is asking about Father's vote in the recent elections: the world comes to a halt. His hands shaking, his voice also, he announces she has no right to ask that, or in fact, anything. Neither of us has enough knowledge to have any opinions. Fine with me: I hate having opinions. So I get in less trouble than Peg, but I feel guilty over that.

Would you say something to your daughter, dearest? She's asking questions again!

At Father's outburst, Peg bursts into tears and flees the room. I stare at my plate and cross my fingers so it won't happen to me. If I don't say anything, maybe he won't yell at me.

(As you know, in the South and probably in a lot of places, daughters don't speak; and that was what I was supposed not to do, certainly not to ask questions and never to have opinions.)

Peg rushes upstairs sobbing, trying not to make any noise. Next time, she says to me later, next time I'll take a deep breath to remember not ever to ask anything, ever. (4)

So then this fictionalized person goes away, falls in love with somebody at Yale. He is the other - he's British.

Peter didn't know American rules for anything.

Anyway, it's about the guy I married and how he played games, always, with his own rules.

I will do your mopping and cleaning for you,

I heard myself saying one day. I was thinking then that I would never long for a career. How could that have been? My friends knew I did; Peter knew I did; How could I not have known?

We were both finishing our theses, his, a dense five hundred pages of philosophy of science, and mine, a mere ninety-six pages on what I called the poetics of possibility, comparing the surrealist writer André Breton and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. (61)

I was interested at that point, as I still am, in Surrealism because it's not supposed to make any sense. And so, with my usual chutzpah, I wanted to make sense of what you couldn't make sense of. So that's why I wrote that.

Easy stuff,

said Peter with a quiet smile, about my thesis. (61)

Easy stuff. And that's what happened to me in my entire career. "Easy stuff. You literary people, easy stuff." Philosophy is hard. Well, maybe that's true.

I would always rather concur than confront. If it was all that obvious, I was unlikely to find anyone to publish it, but I scarcely cared. I was, after all, in love with Peter. What did the rest matter? (61)

And then it goes on, and my father meets this man and says, "He doesn't have all his cards on the table." (laughter) Then he looked back at his newspaper. So, what I remember of my marriage are these few things like this:

We are in Paris, we are taking the children to the Luxembourg to play in the Jardin d'enfants. But we have forgotten their goûter for midafternoon, that sacred snack of chocolate and bread; I know it is my fault. Hilary's frog has escaped from the log of wood we have in our apartment. We are having a picnic by the Seine and looking for it there, improbably. Peter and I are arguing, somewhere on the Left Bank between the streets Gay-Lussac and Saint-Jacques. We separate, furious, and turn back, laughing, and embrace.

We are holding the children on our shoulders during the peace parades in Washington, during the Vietnam war; we are worrying about their nightmares after the fires in their school during the disturbances following Kent State; and we are eternally, in New York, going with them to the boathouse in Central Park, them on the back of our bikes, them on their own little bikes. We feel ourselves a family.

Our boathouse. We lock our bikes to the rail or to each other's, side by side, the little red plaid seat and the little green plaid seat on the back of our black bikes, Matthew behind me and Hilary behind Peter.

In the big freeze, we are walking, all four of us holding hands, across the lake by the boathouse, surrounded by snowshoes and short skis. This is the clearest of the memories. (95)

It all went by so quickly, leaving memories and nothing more.

So then there is this awful divorce and so forth.

In my room, the answering machine, never turned off, kept its light steady. It had flickered less and less as the days went on. The little red light had replaced my husband. When I would lie down in half of my bed, I wouldn't even undo the spread. I'd leave the rest made up while I myself took up less and less room.

If I don't talk to this self, no one will.

I am talking to myself, I say.

This was not the "I" that learned to speak in those pages I scribbled or typed in my journal like some dutiful schoolgirl, the ones that were supposed to show "improvement" after much anguish. (128-9)

I love it - everybody always said, "Therapy, you're writing - wonderful. Your improvement must be getting underway." It never got underway. No.

These were not concerned with narration, with the outside real. In this dryness of love, in which I never wept, I felt nothing at all.

What is real is this. A nightmare, but imageless. A war rages and I think: it will finish this. I see doctors, lawyers, can't remember why, they too all wear wedding rings. How can you say what it's like to tear your wedding ring off? It is like killing a child. Not to have done that is not to have understood. I wore one for almost thirty years, and pulled it off. How to understand that?

Someone reading this might say:

Yes, I understand. I mean, I haven't gone through it exactly, but I understand how it must be.

They may have a little smile of recognition.

Oh, yes, I see.

What do they see? Nothing would appease this panic - this emptiness. I downed hot liquids: coffee, hot lemonade, tea, nothing filled that void inside. (129)

Then it's about what we all do - lecturing:

When I look back now, my life seems made up of conferences and meetings of "learned" societies, of these tedious lecture stands, tables draped with cloth, voices droning or impassioned. All these talks, these times, these places, from Melbourne to Manchester, Washington to Winnipeg - I love the travel itself, more than the talks. You have to look interested in all the subjects, I know, so scribble this or that on a notepad to keep from falling asleep.

(laughter)

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

We are all giving lectures on Surrealism.

Oxymoron. (laughter) It's true.

My neighbor at the table is J.H. Matthews, a Welshman well known for his vitriolic reviews and attitudes, who once said in public to my then husband, "and how does it feel being her wife? (Pause). Oh, sorry." His pale blue eyes just manage to reach over the handlebar moustache he has grown lately, beneath which is what is, I think, intended to be a faint smile. I read it as very faint indeed. As ironic, in fact. He asks if he can see the text I am about to talk from: it is a jumble of crossed-out lines, which I show him, after a slight hesitation. Perhaps that is a twinkle in his eyes as he says, with a sort of grimace, "It makes me sick." He, of course, reads his lectures from sheets perfectly typed by his wife. Right after his talk, and directly before mine, Jan Kott, the Shakespearean and a former surrealist, rises to protest at the general torpor of the meeting. Quite right, I am thinking, when suddenly the filmmaker Arrabal, to my left at the speaker's table, gets up, removes all his clothes, and streaks down the aisle. I can't remember anything else about that meeting. (168-9)

(laughter)

I am teaching To the Lighthouse. In my more idealistic moments, I think of gathering all my friends around, like Mrs. Ramsay. doing her boeuf en daube, knitting people together by candlelight, at some table, with the lighthouse beams coming in, or whatever the New York equivalent might be. I love its having been Roger Fry's recipe . . .. (190)

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I have decided to go down to the Barnes Collection, just to remember how it was when I went there from Bryn Mawr. It is like old times. I take the Paoli local from the train station in Philadelphia to Merion. My heart is pounding.

And that's what it does. I go to a museum and my heart goes clunk, clunk, clunk. So of course, I'm not in the history of art, right? That's sort of a typical story. I love it.

All the pictures I remembered were there, The Cézannes and Matisses and Picassos crowding each other, on top of each other, every one calling for attention. Today they seem to be full of moral lessons about sharpness, slope, certainty, clarity . . ..

A tiny Seurat, with four sailboats and a high horizon. Matisse, Braque: a lemon, a spoon, a glass of water by a white plate. It is enough. Another Matisse, its yellow frame protruding into the room: sharp, certain. Clear shapes: I think my outlines are sometimes muddy.

Clarity of outline . . ..

The thick brightness of Van Gogh's roofs: red, green, yellow. You don't need sadness in things.

In the Giorgione, two men are looking down. I think of a poetry that would look away. (190-1)

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How things vanish when you don't write them down. The tiniest things: the good places to lean over to tie your shoelaces on the old sneakers that are constantly untying themselves. The way some people smile at you in the street when you walk by.

On Park Avenue, in the center of the traffic lanes, some green shoots are pushing up through the snow. My fingers are freezing on my bike handles, but I stop to take from a pole the blank part of an announcement about someone willing to move for you, someone willing to paint for you. I don't have anything to paint or to move, but I love simply to scribble on the paper, in that exaltation of the early morning, that excitement of having too much to do. (194-5)

I still have that excitement. We all have too much to do. It's wonderful. Wonderful.

Joseph Cornell trying to hold on to his experiences, scribbling on napkins to mark his place in books, on catalogues, on envelopes, on record jackets, on anything he could find, cluttering up his study, his diary, his life, but caring so much to get everything down. Not to forget ever any moment.

I'm on my way home, early, to the boathouse, on my bike. Once in the park, I feel free.

My home is in the middle of Central Park. Like an anchor, that dilapidated building welcomes me. I am nervous until I finally push open the green door and go past the telephone - where I sometimes call Carolyn to see if we can walk, or Matthew [my son], to see if he can join me. At the counter, a few desultory remarks, the hot cup between my cold fingers.

I choose a table inside, by the windows, leave it for the terrace, where the old men are still sunning themselves with reflecting foil collars under their chins. I put my feet in their white Reeboks up on the railing, see the snow beneath the terrace, the ducks swimming in the lake delighted between the banks, the trees losing their white profiles as the sun starts up. (195-6)

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I've just seen my face in the mirror. Always a surprise. I look like my father, a thing I used to regret; but he had spunk and moral strength. My chin sticks out like his, as if I were determined. Don't know to do what.

Last night I dreamt of mother in a flowered dress, although she never wore a flowered dress to my knowledge. She was dancing, rather a modern dance, strangely, not her style. She smiled at me and went on dancing. I would have told Carolyn, but she's not here anymore. (196-7)

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Now that I look at it, my journal seems always to have been about coming home . . . no matter where I was. Or trying to find a home to come home to. (197)

The last part is called "Back to the Boathouse."

That smell of plaster of paris in my grandmother's dark-shingled mountain studio comes rushing in again with the sight of the morning glories pressing blue against the walls. An old ring made for her in Venice has replaced my wedding ring - I won't be taking that one off. The light in her eyes may reach over to me this morning, as if, no longer here, she could teach me all the same. Now is when I want to learn. Her energy is there somewhere, ready to be passed on. To me, and maybe from me. (202)

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This telling was once to be about growing up in the South. About some tanglings up and some clearing, and then about a boathouse farther north, another kind of home. It's a story and yet it's true, as far as I can see it. It's funny how it matters where you start being you. I started there, in the southern Tidewater. Now I live somewhere else, but not only. Grandmother knew home was wherever you were and decided to be and dwell. You are wherever you can speak from. I think I've found the right address. (204)