The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [100]
To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it. The space I was born into in Washington, D.C., is now a parking garage; the hospital, like most urban medical centers, has for years been following its Manifest Destiny, building bigger and better buildings surrounded by a wasteland of parking lots. Miraculously, the field across from our house in Beach Park, Illinois, between Waukegan and Zion, where we lived until I was eleven, is still being farmed. Chicago’s development seems to have gone more to the south and west. That field once gave me an uneasy taste of earth. Bigger kids, the ones with more daring, used to sneak through the field to a grove of trees at its center, and one day in spring I decided to go by there myself. I must have been seven or eight years old. I had no idea how steep the furrows would be, how far down my feet would sink into the rich, moist earth.
All I could think of was the folk tale about the girl who trod on a loaf, being too vain to soil her new shoes. I wasn’t wearing new shoes—I wasn’t that foolish—but I couldn’t get the illustration from my book out of my mind: the peevish girl sinking deep underground, pretty new shoes and all. With great fear and trembling I got out of that field, and never went back. I contented myself with visiting the pussy willows in the ditch, and the small pond behind our house.
Hawaii is the next place I remember well, as my family moved there in 1959, just before statehood, and has remained ever since. I graduated from high school in Honolulu. It doesn’t take long, in Hawaii, to register the dramatic, usually dreadful impact of change, and experience a discontinuity with the past. I remember when the Honolulu airport was one room, a hanger open on both ends. You went in the front door to buy your ticket and a flower lei, and walked out the back onto the tarmac to board your plane. I remember when the site of the vast Ala Moana shopping center was a lovely swamp, full of birds whose names I never knew. When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in a hut in Waikiki, he used to walk through this swamp on his way to and from downtown Honolulu.
I once had a job in the library of the Bishop Museum. There, under the vigilant eye of Miss Margaret C. Titcomb, I labeled glass negatives of Honolulu that had been taken around the turn of the century. I knew the city well by then and was shocked to discover that many busy, downtown intersections had once been stream beds with flower-laden banks. The streams had been paved, or made to run underground. I gained a new respect for the power of money, of business interests, to simply sweep place away.
Like many young writers from other places I lived for a time in New York City. The hothouse atmosphere of its literary world was not necessarily good for my writing at the time—my poetry then was hopelessly cerebral, as was the fashion—but there have been residual benefits. Most important is the respect I gained for poetry as an oral art form, listening to readings by poets as diverse as W. H. Auden, Richard Howard, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Tomas Tranströmer, Diane Wakoski, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.
I won a first-book competition during those years; a book full of strange music and promise as well as some dreadful, sophomoric verse. I was sophisticated in the shallow way that only a person in her twenties can be, and both I and my poetry suffered for it. It wasn’t until I had moved to the place of my childhood summers, my grandparents’ house, where my mother grew up, that my voice as a writer emerged. A friend, reading the new poems I began writing there, commented, “When you moved to South Dakota, it’s like you discovered gravity.”
This is a journey many writers have made. Feeling a call to go back to the matrix of the family stories, we place ourselves in their landscape. For me