Walls: Essays, 1985-1990

Introduction

Introduction The essays that make up this collection are largely personal ones, which means that I have the freedom and the responsibility to be both self-absorbed and self-corrective. Clearly, the truths I narrate are largely my own: no one can maintain that this or that did not happen unless they were there. And yet, by the same token, I have the awesome responsibility to protect those who were present-since events did occur, and I am not the only person to have been directly influenced by them. That these " silent" people did not have a hand in the actual writing of this-indeed, that some of them are now dead-means that I have an even more Herculean obligation to tell it well. If I somehow managed here not to break faith with myself, I hope that I have never consciously broken faith with others. The first essay in this book, "A Death in the Family, " began one morning while I was remembering my brother Paul. Paul died of alcoholism in 198 3 , and I, from that moment on, undertook the long process of grieving, one which would tell me a great deal not only about my dead brother but about myself. In truth, Paul's death, paradoxically, made my life real. 13 Introduetion So early one morning I began writing my first essay. It was a difficult process. As a poet, I had always shied away from prose: sentences terrified me. Indeed , I became a poet in the 1960s largely because I felt that my rhythms were undisciplined and jagged; the poem seemed the logical place for my wander­ ings. Until that Sunday morning-when I began to write fever­ ishly with tears in my eyes-I had remained a poet, happily, for six books. But Paul's death-and its terrible pain-caused me to become self-infested. I wanted to cry, shout, flail; I wanted to embrace pain, to coddle it, to finger every inch of my loss. If poems could do this, I did not know how, and so I began to write "A Death in the Family" in 1985. It was my first essay; there would be others. Still, I am a poet by training and yearning, and these essays are "poetic" ones. B y "poetic" I mean that they follow a poet's logic, using the heartfelt, the passionate, and the rhythmic to urge their announcements. If I could not have employed this form, I would not have written. And I needed to write. Writers scribble not only to convey something; they write to live. As a Chinese proverb states, "A bird does not sing because he has the answer. He sings because he has a song." If my brother Paul is the symbolic hub of this collec­ tion, his presence is made manifest in different ways throughout the essays. At times he is the sole impetus for a piece, as in "A Death in the Family" and "Unity Day." At other times he is a distant oracle. In every essay, Paul is the constant harbinger of the significance of the fleeting. the present, the changeable. If I have learned anything, it is that death is irrefutable; no one, I would argue, understands time until he has lost someone irre­ trievably. Paul's death, most certainly, taught me the importance of witness, of seeing. These essays are one person's testimony to the wonderment of life. Not all of these essays concern my brother; some of them do not even mention my family. One involves a trip to an upstate maximum-security prison; another, a fleeting meeting 14 Introduction with the great writer James Baldwin; still another, a reminis­ cence about Baxter Hathaway, my first creative writing teacher, and his excellent writing program at Cornell. All, I hope, are trenchant and honest. A number of these essays have appeared elsewhere, and I am most thankful to the editors. "Walls: A Journey to Auburn" (first published in Community Review) was included in The Best American Essays 1988, edited by Robert Atwan and Annie Dillard. "Unity Day" was first published in Epoch; "The School" in NorthwestReview;"A Death in the Family" in Antioch Review; and " Baxter's Program" in the Arts and Sciences Newsletter. Yet what most pleases me is that these essays have found their way into Alcoholics Anonymous workshops, prison programs, and university lecture halls. This, at least, suggests that...