Marrying memory to the creative impulse
THE WINK OF THE ZENITH: The Shaping of a Writer's Life
By Floyd Skloot
University of Nebraska, 231 pp.,$24.95
A life story, Joseph Conrad has been quoted as saying, may be summarized on a matchbook: He was born, he suffered, he died. The rest is elaboration.
In 1988, at 41, Floyd Skloot contracted a brain virus. The illness left him, as he puts it in "The Wink of the Zenith," "in neurological tatters," shattering his memory, making it difficult for him to retain new information or make sense of the old. For a year his productivity was stymied. Yet Skloot's "elaborations" now amount to 15 books, including novels, poetry, essays, and four volumes of memoirs, all published after his illness.
As images and phrases began resurfacing, he scribbled them on Post-it notes, index cards, and scraps. Eventually he knit the pieces into a series of elegant memoirs. The reconstruction helped him understand his own predicament: "I needed to find out how the pieces I'd jotted down fit together," he observes, "work I could only do by writing, by putting them on the page, seeing what I had, and discovering where it led."
This is not very different from the way - and why - most writers work. While Skloot has covered some of this material before, this time he revisits his past for clues as to what led him to writing in the first place.
It started with baseball. A fan and a collector of baseball cards, the boy felt a personal link to the sport because many of the Dodgers and their families lived around his Brooklyn neighborhood. The team's departure for Los Angeles coincided with the Skloot family's own move to Long Island, after his father sold his kosher poultry market and went to work at his brother-in-law's dress-making factory.
While the move sounded like another step in the conventional American dream of upward mobility, instead it signaled the start of a downward spiral for the Skloots. A car accident sent his father to the hospital and rehab for two years. He never fully recovered; the last time Skloot saw him was at one of his own football games. The men saluted each other. Then his father was gone.
Skloot's mother was forced to move the family to a smaller apartment. At 52, she found herself a single mother embarking on a new career as a travel agent. It may be hard for readers today to imagine the strain a woman in her position would have felt in the early 1960s. Skloot confides that he never felt safe in his own house. His mother was explosive, full of rage; there was "a madness to her behavior," and "sometimes I thought of her as an armed missile." At one point his mother said to him, "You belong in an orphanage," and he later fantasizes responding: "I thought that's where I was." The boy felt responsible for failing to save his father, and his mother did little to relieve him of that delusion.
In a moving chapter he describes how he found a way to reconnect with his mother, now afflicted with dementia, through music and song. Indeed, an implicit and consistent theme running through the book is the power of art as a response to the hard stuff of life.
Skloot rose above his circumstances to create a rich and clearly satisfying family life, travel, and develop a career as a civil servant. Initially, like many other young people entering the work world, he found himself absorbed by its challenges and lost his way as a poet. "I had to learn that Time was not Money. . . . I had to learn to love doing the work, not finishing the work."
Not all baseball fans become writers. Yet Skloot was always interested in more than the game: "It was the announcer's call, not the hit itself, that captivated me." The medium of language was the message he responded to. When a Chinese-American school teacher told Skloot to write an essay about the Dodgers, the boy began to discover it was possible to unite, in Frost's phrase, avocation with vocation.
In highlighting his engagement with sports, popular culture (the book's title comes from a chapter partly about the boy's favorite television shows), summer camp, and other conventional American rituals and rites of passage, Skloot paints himself an Everyman. The other aspect of this remarkable portrait of a remarkable artist, however, reveals the influence of several teachers who helped him develop a way of responding to adversity. Chief among them was a college mentor, a best-selling memoirist with a doctorate from Oxford who also happened to be blind. Surely part of what Skloot learned from working as Robert Russell's assistant was not just how to read deeply and critically but how to transform situations others would find hopeless into opportunities for fresh beginnings.
Askold Melnyczuk recently published his third novel, "The House of Widows." 