Why one autobiography is not enough

            Many years ago, when I was taking Survey of American Literature as an undergraduate, Dr. Howard Creed, our instructor, mentioned that Sherwood Anderson was quite arguably the most influential minor writer in the history of American literature. Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio, a novel that was the first book written by an American which could not have been written at all if the author had not read Freud and, for better or worse, been so powerfully influenced by Freud that it could be truthfully said that, without Freud, the author would never have written that particular book.

            Anderson's novel sold well and was much better than most novels that were selling well at the time. It was especially popular with and widely discussed among those younger readers who fancied themselves "literary" and day-dreamed about novels they might write themselves someday. Winesburg, Ohio is not remembered today as a great book or remembered at all very often. But, it was an influential book in its time. Specifically, Its influence made Freud more important to American writers by showing how psychoanalytic concepts could be used to develop complex characters and plots that unfolded to reveal those complexities. Anderson also wrote six different autobiographies. All were well written and seemed plausible as revelations of Anderson's character. But, each contradicted the other five in key ways that went far beyond just getting some of the details wrong. The six books each candidly revealed the values and needs of a different personality and explained how exactly that personality was shaped by a lifetime of experience, Sherwood Anderson's lifetime of experience.

            What does any of this have to do with how exactly my personality was shaped by a lifetime of experience, not Sherwood Anderson's but my own? This was the question being asked here and I'm fairly sure that you, gentle reader, wish ardently that I would cut the "literary" posturing and answer it. I can sympathize with Anderson and his several mutually exclusive autobiographies. I cannot help but be aware that my past as I remember and retell it is a revisionist history explaining how I came to be the person I think I am as I sit here trying to get something written that will accurately reflect this writer's sensibility and point of view. Episodes will be recounted that I think will do so and those which do not will not come to mind. The result will be a brief character sketch that will have coherency, closure and ring true as a real story about me, but only because of everything that was left out. There is no one true history that reveals the character of the person who lived it. Any number of life-stories can be told about any one person, all of them true but none of them capturing the whole truth all at once in one story.

            I was born in rural Alabama to a farmer and his wife. I was their first and only child. They divorced when I was four and the court awarded custody to my mom. This was pure sexism. Any woman who had not sacrificed an elder infant to Bal would have gotten custody. I remember standing by the fire with my dad in the mornings while I watched Captain Kangaroo and my dad complained about Mr. Green-jeans. Mr. Green-jeans was supposed to be a farmer but was nothing like my dad or any other farmer I or my dad had ever met. My dad thought it was wrong to lie to kids like that.

            Divorce was rare in this time and place. I was the only child from a "broken home" in my first few grades of school. Now, about the same percentage of children in that school come from 'broken homes" as you would find in any other grade school.  I can't recall any episode that would neatly sum up the difference this made at the time but I cannot believe it made no difference at all at a time when Stand by your man and D-i-v-o-r-c-e were two big hits, both by Tammy Wynette, that were played endlessly on the radio. I feel it must have made a difference so I tell you a story about Tammy Wynette to fill a hole in my story where a recalled episode should sit providing the perfect example illustrating the difference it made.

            I am the product of one of those segregation academies that sprung up like mushrooms after a summer rain the year after the Alabama schools finally desegregated. I was embarrassed to be there at the time but, looking back, I think I was probably better off there. Academic standards were about the same at both schools and not terribly high at either. My grandfather was on the academy governing board. His grandfather, James Monroe Roberts, was blinded fighting for the Confederacy at the battle of Atlanta. Another ancestor, Richard Roberts, fought in the revolutionary war. One fought to be an American and the other fought not to be. My great-grandfather, Carlos Roberts, was a school superintendent who believed in flying saucers. He was a break in the chain. My grandfather often mentioned to me that I reminded him of his father in so many ways that it was a bit spooky. The academy gave me more of what I needed to be another break in the chain than a desegregated public school could have. The academy did not reproduce the all-white public school that no longer existed. It produced a parody of that situation that magnified and exaggerated all of the more negative aspects of the culture that resisted desegregation so stubbornly, of my culture of origin. I felt more out of place there than I ever felt in the public schools either before or after desegregation. This made me look around and notice that no one I wanted to be in 20 years time was a part of that culture. This gap between where I came from and where I wanted to be was more obvious to me because I attended the academy.  

           

            Very early on, I found that reading books gave me a satisfying sense of knowing what was going on and why that I never got from participating in the way of life I had been born to. I used resources found in books to understand my self and my world much more than any of my peers. I learned early to walk between worlds and still do. One world is the world where my own life unfolds and the other is the world of books. Should I mention discovering the novel Steppenwolf  at age 14 as an important event in my life? Naturally, I wanted to be a writer when and if I ever managed to grow up. I also wanted to know the meaning of life and to understand why the rest of humanity did the things that humanity has been doing for thousands of years now. Once I figured all this out, I was going to get rich and famous by writing it all down in a book with a boy meets girl sub-plot and maybe a car chase or two thrown in just to make the movie rights more rewarding. This work is still in progress.

            In the meantime, I've earned degrees in philosophy, English, educational psychology, instructional technology and won the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of America award. I am now working on an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies with ESL and plain old psychology as my two majors. I am doing the psychology major just to find out what had to be left out of my degree in educational psychology to make room for all those courses I took in research design, statistics, qualitative methods and testing theory that were not taught in the psychology program. Once I am done, I can die happy knowing that I did not cheat myself out of anything by graduating from an education school rather than a psychology department. I will, unfortunately, be too old to do much of anything with that vast body of knowledge but, then again, my quest for knowledge was always more about pure, damnable curiosity than about the desire to learn to actually do anything in particular. I've taught or tutored psychology, English, research methods and a few other subjects over the years. I am mostly a distance educator now but still occasionally teach or tutor on-ground. I am serious enough about animal rights to be vegan. I play several drums and a few different stringed instruments for fun. Kristoff, my cat, is curled up asleep on my desk as he usually is when I am trying to get some work done.

           

            I'm watching this text appear on a sixty inch screen. I am not legally blind but I am blind enough that I was able to write the screen off on my taxes as an adaptive required for work. I grade a lot of essays and do get headaches when I work with a smaller monitor. I also watch a lot of subtitled movies. I am not married and have no children. I live with three other adults in what will eventually become a naturally occurring retirement community for old hippies if we really have come to final rest here.

           

            From the beginning, I have been fascinated by words. Over the years, my emphasis has shifted from literature and creative writing to teaching English as a second language. Doing a degree in ESL so that I theoretically know what I am doing has been a wonderful excuse to learn more about linguistics and to think and write about language, how it is acquired, how it is used and how one can best facilitate the acquisition of a second language. I say "theoretically" know what I am doing because I, more and more, see language as a kind of magic we learn how to do as we grow up without ever learning how the magic actually works.