TOPOGRAPHY

Patricia Hampl was a bright and noble friend for the two years we each lived out in the green plains just west of the Mississippi River. Her work since then has earned truly its many devotees, and her understanding of memoir has withstood distortion and contamination by the hot vogue of its adjacent cousins, genealogy and blatant self-reflection. I vex myself by saying that she is the wittiest woman I have ever known, thus revealing latent gender prejudices, but other than the writing of Dorothy Parker, the band of literary wits is gentle men.

A Romantic Education was published in 1981, an era when my feverish reading of Pound, Henry James, and Briffault had wholly given way to feverish reading of bicycling manuals, bicycling catalogs, and tales of sailing. My rustication was quite fine, yet hermetic. Since my MFA thesis at Iowa had concerned itself with the Cayuga Iroquois who had not so long before fished the very waters upon which I sailed and rowed, and the long thesis poem had ventured fanciful semantic fantasies about their linguistic interpretation of our topography, I could not avoid presuming that Pat’s “sometimes in fake and unconvincing ways” was remembering my poetastical presumptions. But I’d had about the same reaction then as I later had when in a book Brock Yates lifted without attribution a phrase from a letter I’d written him, and when Stacy Schiff had lavishly and embarrassingly overlauded me in the credits to her Pulitzer Prize winning book in 2000: it was only pleasant to be inside a joke.

But I regard the Cayuga who grew peaches in Chonodote (Aurora) and netted graylings in the gorge creeks at the south end of the lake principally as persons like myself who regard this glacial topography as the immanent form in which all ideas and perceptions – and all poems too – are born and flourish. People who live and write in Ithaca listen to the torrents of spring, and are deafened-to-trance by this second source of thunder; they throw fifteen-year-old virgins off 215 foot waterfalls; we never thought it was necessarily amusing that Daisy Miller came from a blunt place called Schenectady, and George Washington camped on West Hill, just up from the wayward inlet that one day would be called the Rhine, and his colonels couldn’t always get his attention because he would spend hours tossing a ball back and forth with some of his young soldiers. You may wish to look this up. I rode the city buses listening to girls have conversations that sounded like Roman declamations; the land shall submit to floodwaters, and east shore towns shall have constant dawns, the sun rising and obscured by long hills. It is natural that green knee socks gain a quarter inch of supple sinew from climbing slopes and steps. There seem to be currents on the water, rippling cross the garden party bits of conversation heaving breasts, and clefts take bits from the horizon, cool wet walkways did they secret themselves within, eddies turn the story round; and we are always climbing, fountains sunsets creeks. They were not braves here, and we let the Tuscarora in later on because in Carolina their talk had become barbarbar. Keeping fire; the Iroquois were matrilineal; Apaches sought their democratic counsel. It is useful to remember that the Iroquois had no word or use for mythology. There is a small triangular park up Elm Street, upon which fifty years ago I sat for centuries benumbed with wonder that there was no noticeable difference between what I thought of as the past and what I thought of as the future. Now I go there with a bottle of sherry in a paper bag and a good cigar and take the measure of the certainty that this is where George played ball, and where, if it came to that, I would chase and prepare bunnies for my evening meal. Poetically.