The Past Is Not What Happened

The past is not even the past.

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë painted by their brother Branwell

As I read old notebooks, I see how, in time, I’ve come to rewrite my life in ways that are consoling. I have unsoured the grapes of the past. The story I invented of my earlier years is one of reliable success, few obstacles, and lots of help—a kind of table laid where I was invited to eat. Buon appetito!

What memory has sanded down and that the notebooks show is the way I felt in the face of rejection. And how much rejection there was. I wasn't a hero for pressing on. I didn’t believe in my abilities. This is something I haven’t obscured in memory because it remains true. I don't need to believe in my abilities in order to go after something. When I want something, I will mostly keep going, as if I’m extending my life.

So much more of the past was hard than I’ve remembered, and in the notebooks it comes swimming back, and I see the faces of people I’ve forgotten and rooms where I felt small and underestimated.

There’s so much more sexism and misogyny than I’ve wanted to retain. This is maybe weird to report as a person who gained a life because she knew early on that every generalization made about women was a lie.

In a notebook entry written in 1977, I found a scene of astonishing I-don’t-like-you-Laurie at the hands of Steven Marcus, who was the advisor for my dissertation at Columbia University. In those days, Steven Marcus was pretty much the head honcho of 19^th Century studies in the graduate English department. He had written a sexy book about Victorian pornography called The Other Victorians (1966). He wrote books as well about Dickens, Freud, and a book about Engels I have to tell you I learned a ton from.

I learned from all of his books. He was not a sexy man. He was a smart man with a raspy, Bugs Bunny voice a friend of mine was good at taking off. I chose to work with him because I thought I was supposed to be with the smartest man in any room, where there was a smartest man. As I look back, the concept of the smart man was a real thing to me. That the smart man probably had a lot of dumb ideas that flowed from his being the sort of person who believed in the concept of the smart man was not at that time an understanding I think I had formed.

In choosing Steven Marcus as the smartest man in the room, there was a kind of sex vibe in that for me. When I say a “sex vibe,” I mean a kind of erotic energy that goes on between people that can mean I want to fuck you but doesn’t have to mean I want to fuck you. I think this happens between me and lots of people of both sexes and can be confusing to others. It’s a gravitational pull people can like if it meets their animal or dislike if it doesn’t meet their animal.

I wanted Steven Marcus to like me, and when you want someone to like you, when you can feel it overtaking you, they are never going to like you. This fact underlies the whole erotic machinery of the world, and that’s funny if you live long enough to find most things funny that are implacable.

I was also floating around the world and floating around in my head with the thought, men are my friends. Men are the people who like me. I like women, and they also scare me. Men don’t scare me, because men are my friends. I was floating around the world depending on this. I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering, If you’re such a big fat feminist, why didn’t you understand that men on an individual basis, not only amassed as a force of we own the mechanisms of power over women, why didn’t you understand that individual men could also not like you on a personal basis? My answer to this question in the past would be the same as my answer now: I don’t want this to be true. It destabilizes my world. If women scare me (and I also like them) and men can’t be relied on to be nice to me, I’m in the world alone on a cold, wind-swept wasteland.

Steven Marcus can hardly bring himself to speak to me when I come to his office to discuss my work. I’ve already passed my orals with a “distinction.” I don’t think Marcus was on my committee. I don’t remember him there. In those days, the oral exam went on for several hours and covered four giant blocks of scholarship, in my case: Victorian literature, modern drama, medieval literature, and William Blake. I knew this backwards and forwards. I was a tennis player at the net, slamming back answers at them. “Where is Harriet Mill buried?” “Avignon,” I said, with almost bored aplomb.

I’m now writing my dissertation about Charlotte Brontë, and on the first chapter I give Marcus, there are no positive comments. He writes, "Your writing isn't up to the level which I know you are capable of, it obscures the clarity of the ideas, etc. I don't ever want to see anything like this again." He continues about the organization—“it lacks a center, a focus, a thesis, and many particular details are either imprecise or wrong.”

Now, I actually love the phrase, “it lacks a center, a focus, a thesis, and many particular details are either imprecise or wrong.” Marcus seems to be predicting my future style. Maybe it was the style I was already developing and that wasn’t for him. He was never going to be my reader, I must have felt.

He’s not the only reason I let go of the dissertation. I let go of the dissertation, but I didn’t let go of the Brontës and my feminist take on their writing and lives. If you want to read something pretty interesting I wrote about them, here’s a link to post on my stack about Charlotte and Emily: lauriestone.substack.com/p/sister-act

The thing is, in memory, in the story I told myself after more or less dropping out of graduate school—something I did not do before this experience or after it—I told myself I didn't care about becoming a scholar, which is true. I did not care. It was never going to be my life. I told myself I had become the kind of writer I wanted to be. I was being published in the places I wanted to be published in, and so I didn’t need to finish the dissertation. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

I was demoralized. I was rejected on an intellectual basis and on what felt like a personal basis. I didn’t fight my way out of these feelings. I didn’t know how. I went through a similar kind of shut-down and skulking off after being fired from the Village Voice by two men, Don Forst and Doug Simmons, who looked at me with a sort of fang-dripping contempt, and who found a reason to stop paying me that had nothing to do with my work. It would turn out they were on a campaign to fire as many people as they could, and soon the heads of most of the regulars at the paper would roll. At the time I was fired, in 1999, I didn’t know this sweep of firings was coming. Looking back, knowing the firing wasn’t that personal or meaningful, a lot of the pain drains away, but it doesn’t undo the fact that part of me was stopped and sad and entered a period of what do I do next?

Is this piece about blame? I don’t think it’s about blame. I think it’s about times when all the mirrors in the fun house make you look broken.

During the time Richard and I have lived in our house, he’s told me he’s heard his name called out six times by ghosts. One afternoon at Yaddo, the artist colony where we met, he was walking around the grounds when he felt a cold wind swirl around him and a ghost move through him. I hardly knew him, and after he told me the story I felt a body move through my body, the way you do when you’re falling in love. At our house the other day, I heard my name called out, and when I went to Richard's studio, I said, “Did you call me?” He said, “No.”

We keep hearing our names called out because it’s the past wanting back in and for us to tell another story about it. The past wants to be seen as it was, and we can’t do that. We can only see the past through now, and that’s funny to me, even if it might not be funny to the person I once was.

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In Other News

A gigantic, insolent groundhog has found a home on our property. The same one for two years, living under the deck. Now, he comes onto the deck. We have a spring loaded whatever to trap him and that can't hurt him. I'm mentioning this so you won't think we're mean to animals. I don't know why I care what you think. I just don't want the bother of deleting your comments about what to do.

The ground hog isn't interested in the bait in the box. He thinks it's ridiculous when he can eat anything else he wants. I'm not going to tell you what he's already eaten that I love. I hate him as deeply as some people I was thinking about today.

We were in New York, and as we were driving down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I remembered my old life with a man I used to bike with along the river. He’s a man I loved and still do, maybe, the way you can still get DNA from a body frozen for 40,000 years.

I was saying to Richard how much I hate this man and what I’d say to him if we bumped into him on the street. I’d say, “You were a bad friend when I met you and a bad friend for twenty-five years.” Richard said, “You wouldn’t say that to him.” I said, “I absolutely would.” Then I thought about why I’d say that, and I couldn’t think of a reason that would satisfy anyone, including me.

I hate the ground hog far more than I hate this man because I never loved the ground hog. The first time I saw his giant face and horrifying teeth, I felt nothing even close to, okay, you stay over there and I’ll stay over here, and we won’t talk to each other. Now that I’m thinking about it, the ground hog and the man have similar faces. You probably think I’m making this up, but it’s the god’s honest truth.

The other day, when I saw the ground hog on the deck, I felt a sense of invasion I know you have felt at one time or another by a water bug as big as your fist in your bedroom, or by a family member. The next day, we saw the ground hog had eaten all of the parsley plants and all of the petunias growing on the deck. Growing on the deck purposely to keep them away from the animals! All of the parsley! I had tons. Now, I have nothing.

It’s raining really hard right now, and I love country rain. I love being in the house while rain is blurring the windows and making those pinging and rushing sounds. There’s no chance the ground hog will be carried out to a sea that doesn’t exist on our farm road. I can see him, floating on a wooden pallet, steady and unafraid, his malicious snout pointing annoyingly into the wind.

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Think about a memory engraved in your mind and rewrite it with a different setting or outcome. If the memory makes you sad to contemplate, rewrite it so it prompts a different emotion, such as laughter or excitement.

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Beckett laughing