Winter Dreams

Woke up thinking idly of the opening golf course scene in Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," and that got me thinking about how it really became sort of a tiresome schtick, Fitzgerald always punishing a female character (with loss of looks and life potential) for the emptiness of his protagonists' aspirations in those proto-Gatsby stories. But then I started thinking about the dreamy summer of 1973 I spent in Beattie, Kansas, with my sister Linda when I was fourteen or fifteen and first read "Winter Dreams" and the rest of a collection of Fitzgerald stories edited by Malcolm Cowley that I pulled from her bookcase, along with Podkayne of Mars, Catch-22, and Conan the Barbarian (that last pulled from my brother-in-law's stash). There were other books picked up and discarded that summer: an abridged Clarissa, for instance, and other books discussed. Linda was having difficulty sleeping that summer and told me she found that Pilgrim's Progress, taken in a small dose at bedtime was often effective in putting her under, in the absence of The Faerie Queen, also handy in that regard. 

I was transitioning from fourteen to fifteen that summer, a late-blooming, serious and self-critical adolescent, and Linda would have been twenty-eight. Pregnant with her first child, she had completed all but her master's thesis and never would. She confided in me once, maybe not that summer but some other time, that she was glad enough to let it lie. Writing that thesis was not what she found she needed to do. But she was the pattern for me in many ways of the reader I was growing into and the English major and academic I would shortly become: an omnivorous, but discriminating reader, with a large, unawed acquaintance with the classics and an interest in "junk" reading as well: drug store science fiction, westerns and the occasional bodice-ripper. All she and I ask from drug store books is that the prose style not make us roll up our eyes and gag. Both of us are pretty much willing to grant authors their premises, so long as they run with them sure-footedly. 

My mother had sent me to northeast Kansas for the summer because my brother-in-law had been posted to another part of the state by Farmers Cooperative and would only be home for a few weekends that summer. My job was to  keep Linda company, help out when I could--in the getting ready for a baby department--and probably be out of the way back home, as mine was an uncomfortable age for  my mother. I do not believe I was much actual help, though I sewed a few bibs and other Useful Baby Objects; but I know I was company of the best kind: fascinated by a sister who-- thirteen years older than me, had left for college when I was five, then been left behind in California by my family during one of our frequent moves, then married and moved herself out to the Midwest--was a comparative stranger, grown up, self-assured and possessed of her own life. She seemed to have read everything and had strong and humorous opinions on most of it. I absorbed her every word and read, or did not read, according to her one- or two-sentence reviews. So strong an influence did she have that I have not yet, to this day, forty years later, opened Pilgrim's Progress or The Faerie Queen, contriving to avoid those college courses where they might be taught and fashioning myself as an Americanist so I never would have to. (I did finally in grad school read Clarissa, whose reticences I found just as amusing as I am sure she surely had.)
Country and western music was always on the radio that summer, and Watergate was always on the TV. We watched it endlessly and declared it the best soap opera ever. Along with the rest of the hearings audience we breathlessly hung on the revelations of the wonky, weirdly attractive former White House counsel John Dean. Liddy, Haldeman, Mitchell, Erlichman, Magruder: we knew them all--the villains--who surely would have twirled their mustachios  if they'd had them to twirl (as Liddy in fact did though it was not of the twirlable kind). And off stage, in the crack between the chapters, somehow both pulling the strings and and being pulled by them, Tricky Dick, the embodiment of the evil of banality, as Thomas Pynchon showed so well with one word in the epigraph to the last part of Gravity's Rainbow, published earlier that year. 

When we weren't watching, we drove all over northeast Kansas in Linda's VW Super Beetle to do summer things: paint ceramics, see summer theater (The Fantasticks and A Comedy of Errors in Waterville), have a chocolate ice cream soda at a drugstore counter in Marysville. Once we faced down a bull on the roadway, and once during a thunderstorm we drove over a flooded patch of the road, crossing our fingers that it wasn't deeper than it seemed. I learned to recognize milo in a field, particularly a tall variety known as Atlas. When I got back to Yerington later that summer I began to read in earnest, having picked up from my sister that past the mere consumption of books was the thinking and talking about books. I wouldn't get to Gravity's Rainbow until some fifteen years later; there was just so much out there to read. The summer of '73 was probably the summer that made me who I am.

So my winter dreams this day are backward, not forward, backward to summer dreams of a future of reading. If there were a perplexing demanding object of desire in those days would it have been a desire to be possessed of my future self, perhaps also just as empty an object of desire as the one at the center of "Winter Dreams"  and probably as unpossessable because not actually real. But there's no sense in taking it out on the poor imaginary thing, really, is there, Scott?