A love story after all

WHAT can we expect of memoir? If this has always been an open-ended question, it seems especially so now. “We build our stories, like houses on the high mesa, with whatever is at hand,” Gail Caldwell suggests in “A Strong West Wind,” the story of her escape from Amarillo, Texas, her coming-of-age in the 1960s and her relationship with her father. Somewhere in this process, Caldwell (like so many well-intentioned memoirists) loses control of her story, but in the end, a channel opens, a pathway to the unconscious is unblocked and something other, something unexpected, rushes forth.

Why buy a ticket to such an epiphany? Three reasons: First, Caldwell, whose 20 years of writing book reviews for the Boston Globe earned her a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 2001, was saved by literature. (“A Strong West Wind” is not a recovery memoir, but the author, like all souls, has teetered on more than one brink.) Second, she has been a restrained, humble critic for most of her working life, putting the books she reviews first and her voice second, an increasingly rare and fascinating feat. Third, she has come to terms with her parents and her past, which means there is wisdom to be gleaned.

In 1981, at the age of 30, Caldwell left Texas in an old Volvo, headed for Cambridge, Mass., with “an Oriental rug, a beat-up German typewriter, and a quart of Jack Daniel’s” in her trunk. “I suppose I thought I was hitching a ride on the narrative that would save me,” she explains. “Surely you had to leave home to write, and to have something to write about, and surely you had to go East.” That may be true, but growing up in Texas meant that Caldwell was not afraid of a good story; she didn’t then, and still does not, possess the Easterner’s debilitating irony. For all her years as a critic and her Pulitzer, Caldwell still has a kind of breathlessness when she describes Berkeley in the 1960s, her father in uniform, the beauty of the Catholic Mass, the romance of the writer’s life or her hometown library back in Amarillo.

In Texas, a state she both loved and had to leave, it was “difficult not to feel beholden to some larger design.” Caldwell’s handsome, larger-than-life father came from a long line of Panhandle farmers; like many men in the family, he fought in World War II. “Poverty and war were the ruthless truths of my parents’ generation,” she writes, matter-of-factly. “[I]f you survived one, it was likely that the other was waiting in the wings.” Her beautiful mother, meanwhile, was “the small-town Texas version of Rosie the Riveter.” On both sides, the examples set by rebellious women and men who left Texas to make it in the wide world gave shape and focus to Caldwell’s growing discontent. And the reading didn’t help.

One could argue (as self-appointed censors often do) that Caldwell’s voracious reading -- beginning with war stories like Herman Wouk’s “Youngblood Hawke,” then progressing to Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and the work of Philip Roth and Jack Kerouac -- helped lay the groundwork for the angst, soul searching and rebellion that pried her (for worse but mostly better) from her father and eventually, Texas.

Certainly, the growth of Caldwell’s restlessness parallels the increasing turmoil in 1960s America, fueled by a war that made chasms out of cracks in the social landscape, setting politicians against citizens and children against parents. “[O]ne toppling begat another,” Caldwell writes as her consciousness begins to open, giving way to an awareness of world events. It’s a subtle shift, but it brings perspective to the telling of her life. She looks around and sees a Texas “so white it hurt your eyes.” She goes back to the University of Texas to do graduate work in American studies, where she is warned by a teacher she admires, in “a tone so dry he could start a brush fire with it,” to avoid sweeping prose and not “overdo it.”

In the early 1970s, Caldwell has her first taste of feminism. She’s spent her life, she realizes, trying to please men -- her father as well as her bad-boy Amarillo boyfriend, Travis. “Feminism,” as she puts it, “redirects the narrative. It was when the story, for a million protagonists, finally stopped being about somebody else.” Somewhere around this time, the story of Caldwell’s relationship with her father stops being his story and starts being hers. Understanding him becomes a way to understand herself. “The father instructs,” she writes, “the child ingests, until memory itself becomes the long way home.”

From here, “A Strong West Wind” veers back, almost exclusively, into that relationship, as if Caldwell’s father were, finally, a mirror in which she might divine “what sort of identity [she] was reaching toward.” She pores over letters written during the war years from her father to her mother. She tries to understand why her Uncle Roy, who fled Texas to become a successful lawyer, killed himself. The more she unearths, the more she marvels at her father’s silence and at the power of war to alter forever the course of a life. Many of us have parents whose lives were similarly disrupted, affecting their behavior and their hopes for their children, leaving us with gaping mysteries to solve. Why did they drink so much? Why did they work so hard? Why didn’t they communicate more easily? These are just a few of the questions we ask.

“Each of us has these cloisters where the old discarded dreams are stored, innocuous as toys in the attic,” Caldwell comments. “The real beauty of the question -- how do we become who we are?-- is that by the time we are old enough to ask it, to understand its infinite breadth, it is too late to do much about it.”

True, but not true. At the end of “A Strong West Wind,” Caldwell’s father lies dying in a veterans’ hospital, watched over by a fellow soldier who developed various soft-tissue cancers from exposure to Agent Orange. Caldwell knows exactly how much her father means to her, how much she needed to disappoint him and how much his identity was formed by the war in which he fought. In 2003, when he dies, she is 52, with a clearer mind for reading, a keener eye for noticing and at least one character in her life fully loved.

I wonder if Caldwell knew when she started that “A Strong West Wind” would be so much about her father. The book pours into that tributary with a momentum that would swamp any carefully drawn outline or chronology. The result is something authentic, something pure.

**

From A Strong West Wind

IT was around this time that my father began what I dismally thought of as our Sunday drives. As kids, my sister and I had been bored but tolerant when we had to tag along on his treks; my father’s route was aimless, and in the Panhandle, there were few destinations to choose from. But now his itinerary was to chart the path of my dereliction, and that meant getting me alone in the car so that we could “talk”: about my descent into wildness, my imminent doom, my mother’s high blood pressure. Thus incarcerated, slouched in the shotgun seat with my arms folded against my chest, I responded to his every effort by either staring out the window or yelling back. I don’t remember a word I ever said. What I still feel is the boulder on my heart -- the amorphous gray of the world outside the car window, signaling how trapped I felt, by him and by the hopeless unawareness of my years. We usually wound up on the bleak outskirts of Amarillo, and I can see us now against that long horizon, an angry father and his angry daughter, having lost our way.